The Value of Digital Tools

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One key innovation has been the use of a crisis toolkit, drawing upon our past experience working with businesses in difficult situations. This eight-step approach helped entrepreneurs take stock of the situation, conduct a business model assessment to identify new opportunities, and prioritize key actions needed to weather the crisis. Many of the entrepreneurs we spoke to mentioned that our team’s first step — checking in and letting the business owners know that they were not alone — was the most significant.

It was the crisis toolkit that helped Catarina Bié, a participant in the Business Women Connect program, make the changes needed to save her business. Other entrepreneurs experienced similar benefits from this support: In Peru, small- and medium-sized businesses in one TechnoServe program had increased their sales by 81% within two months of starting to use the crisis toolkit. We saw that the approach opened the door to new opportunities for entrepreneurs in the country, enabling them to korea whatsapp number data capitalize on changes, like the rapid shift to e-commerce, that have emerged from the pandemic.



The effective digitization of our support is an important part of this response as well. Even in places where eased restrictions have enabled in-person training and advisory efforts to resume, digital tools will allow us to provide training to more people, more efficiently and more conveniently for entrepreneurs. But it’s important that we focus on the quality of this training, constantly testing and refining it to ensure that it delivers the right information in the right format, tailored to the entrepreneurs’ degree of digital engagement. At TechnoServe, we’ve been continuously testing approaches to effectively drive behavior change through digital delivery. The results to date have been very encouraging, and we’re preparing for a larger-scale randomized control trial with academic research partners over the next two years.

Digital tools are also important for addressing access to finance. Digital lending provides a way to quickly disburse emergency grants or loans to entrepreneurs; coupled with technical assistance, this can be a highly effective tool for helping entrepreneurs weather the crisis. To that end, the mSPARK program, a partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and 4G Capital, is providing digitally enabled loans and basic advisory services to more than 30,000 micro-retailers in Kenya. Interim data showed that the repayment rate was four times higher than it was for loans distributed to similar entrepreneurs without training.