A promising early start for BRAC Shakti
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 8:12 am
At the end of each gathering, women have the option of visiting a nearby agent shop to deposit money into their digital savings accounts. For every week that women deposit, they earn rewards of increasing value. Instead of rewarding a one-off deposit, we wanted to incentivize the building of a savings habit, by offering women bigger rewards if they deposit multiple times at regular intervals.
At the end of the eight-week program, groups that meet their overall savings goals unlock a significant reward, such as inputs or training they can use to set up a household livestock business.
Breaking negative feedback cycles and unlocking viability in a rural market
BRAC Shakti breaks down barriers in digital and financial literacy by creating safe, peer-mediated spaces where women can come together to learn and practice. Furthermore, in the design of BRAC Shakti’s incentives, our team offered 100 taka (roughly US $1.15) to any user who downloaded the bKash app and cashed into their new account. We used 100 taka intentionally as our benchmark for the value of these savings rewards, since at the time, bKash was already offering this amount in rewards to all new customers. Our goal was to show that acquiring rural women could be no more costly to bKash than acquiring users through its existing channels. The BRAC Shakti program conducted an initial pilot in 2020, and BRAC is currently conducting a larger pilot with more than 5,000 women, aiming (in part) to iterate on the value and form of these rewards.
Based on these pilots, it has become clear that people who begin to use bKash through the BRAC Shakti program are more valuable customers than people who randomly download the bKash app and may or may not use it. By the time they complete the “BRAC Shakti Challenge,” in which an entire savings group unlocks rewards at the end of the program if all its members reach their saving goals, participants have repeatedly deposited funds into their accounts, and have developed a high degree of familiarity with the app. They are positioned to be long-term users of bKash. Throughout the ongoing pilot, the BRAC team will monitor how cambodia whatsapp number data completion of BRAC Shakti impacts long-term use of bKash’s mobile money products.
One of the challenges social enterprises face is that, while driven by social missions, they’re ultimately accountable to market forces that historically have made it financially difficult to reach the most marginalized customers. With BRAC Shakti, the partnership between a DFS provider (bKash) and an NGO that has an existing rural presence (BRAC) has managed to break down the fundamental financial barriers currently preventing DFS providers from investing in rural women. In so doing, both parties benefit: bKash competitively acquires a loyal customer base in rural women, and BRAC achieves its mandate of reaching historically underserved populations – while also building a user base that can later participate in its own microfinance offerings.
We embarked on this design journey with two organizations that agreed to prototype the BRAC Shakti Challenge approach together during a five-month period in 2020. Now, during the expanded pilot stage, BRAC is holding the reins and iterating on the BRAC Shakti model as it is put into practice by 5,000 women. Our hope is that this work will inspire other DFS providers and organizations with rural reach to explore partnerships that enable the sector to sustainably reach and empower communities at the margins.
At the end of the eight-week program, groups that meet their overall savings goals unlock a significant reward, such as inputs or training they can use to set up a household livestock business.
Breaking negative feedback cycles and unlocking viability in a rural market
BRAC Shakti breaks down barriers in digital and financial literacy by creating safe, peer-mediated spaces where women can come together to learn and practice. Furthermore, in the design of BRAC Shakti’s incentives, our team offered 100 taka (roughly US $1.15) to any user who downloaded the bKash app and cashed into their new account. We used 100 taka intentionally as our benchmark for the value of these savings rewards, since at the time, bKash was already offering this amount in rewards to all new customers. Our goal was to show that acquiring rural women could be no more costly to bKash than acquiring users through its existing channels. The BRAC Shakti program conducted an initial pilot in 2020, and BRAC is currently conducting a larger pilot with more than 5,000 women, aiming (in part) to iterate on the value and form of these rewards.
Based on these pilots, it has become clear that people who begin to use bKash through the BRAC Shakti program are more valuable customers than people who randomly download the bKash app and may or may not use it. By the time they complete the “BRAC Shakti Challenge,” in which an entire savings group unlocks rewards at the end of the program if all its members reach their saving goals, participants have repeatedly deposited funds into their accounts, and have developed a high degree of familiarity with the app. They are positioned to be long-term users of bKash. Throughout the ongoing pilot, the BRAC team will monitor how cambodia whatsapp number data completion of BRAC Shakti impacts long-term use of bKash’s mobile money products.
One of the challenges social enterprises face is that, while driven by social missions, they’re ultimately accountable to market forces that historically have made it financially difficult to reach the most marginalized customers. With BRAC Shakti, the partnership between a DFS provider (bKash) and an NGO that has an existing rural presence (BRAC) has managed to break down the fundamental financial barriers currently preventing DFS providers from investing in rural women. In so doing, both parties benefit: bKash competitively acquires a loyal customer base in rural women, and BRAC achieves its mandate of reaching historically underserved populations – while also building a user base that can later participate in its own microfinance offerings.
We embarked on this design journey with two organizations that agreed to prototype the BRAC Shakti Challenge approach together during a five-month period in 2020. Now, during the expanded pilot stage, BRAC is holding the reins and iterating on the BRAC Shakti model as it is put into practice by 5,000 women. Our hope is that this work will inspire other DFS providers and organizations with rural reach to explore partnerships that enable the sector to sustainably reach and empower communities at the margins.