The challenge of building a business case for serving rural women
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 8:12 am
Before coming to IDEO.org, I worked in product management for Wave Money, one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing fintech companies. The company’s mission is to create a fairer future for Myanmar, and to that end, we made significant strides: By 2020 the company estimated that over 11% of the country’s GDP was being transferred via its mobile money accounts.
But as much as our mission centered on financial inclusion, we faced a core tension that all socially minded fintechs do: Reaching last-mile communities that have historically been excluded is hard for a business that also has to attend to its own bottom line. There are crucial market realities that make serving last-mile communities desirable from an impact perspective, but hard to prioritize from a business one.
Soon after I began working at IDEO.org, one of my first projects threw our product design team head-first into this tension. With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we partnered with BRAC (a prominent international nonprofit working to empower disadvantaged communities in Bangladesh), bKash (Bangladesh’s leading mobile wallet and a subsidiary of BRAC Bank), and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics to increase access to digital financial services (DFS) for women living in the Haor region of Bangladesh, by assisting them in downloading and using the bKash app. As the business designer on the team, I knew we’d have to cambodia whatsapp number data build a viable business case for targeting these rural women in order for IDEO.org’s co-created designs to succeed.
Throughout the project, I kept putting myself in the shoes of my former manager at Wave Money, and asked myself what it might take to prioritize reaching rural women, despite the pressure of aggressive financial targets our team had to consistently meet. To better understand that pressure and why market realities make it hard to invest in rural outreach targeting women, let’s explore a few of the negative feedback loops at play in many emerging markets.
Why is building a viable business case for rural women so tricky? Let’s start by taking a closer look at the potential users of digital financial services – in this case, women living in rural areas of Bangladesh. Different levels of digital and financial literacy among these customers can make the experience of conducting a financial transaction on a mobile device confusing and risky. After all, one wrong click or swipe could mean money lost forever.
But as much as our mission centered on financial inclusion, we faced a core tension that all socially minded fintechs do: Reaching last-mile communities that have historically been excluded is hard for a business that also has to attend to its own bottom line. There are crucial market realities that make serving last-mile communities desirable from an impact perspective, but hard to prioritize from a business one.
Soon after I began working at IDEO.org, one of my first projects threw our product design team head-first into this tension. With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we partnered with BRAC (a prominent international nonprofit working to empower disadvantaged communities in Bangladesh), bKash (Bangladesh’s leading mobile wallet and a subsidiary of BRAC Bank), and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics to increase access to digital financial services (DFS) for women living in the Haor region of Bangladesh, by assisting them in downloading and using the bKash app. As the business designer on the team, I knew we’d have to cambodia whatsapp number data build a viable business case for targeting these rural women in order for IDEO.org’s co-created designs to succeed.
Throughout the project, I kept putting myself in the shoes of my former manager at Wave Money, and asked myself what it might take to prioritize reaching rural women, despite the pressure of aggressive financial targets our team had to consistently meet. To better understand that pressure and why market realities make it hard to invest in rural outreach targeting women, let’s explore a few of the negative feedback loops at play in many emerging markets.
Why is building a viable business case for rural women so tricky? Let’s start by taking a closer look at the potential users of digital financial services – in this case, women living in rural areas of Bangladesh. Different levels of digital and financial literacy among these customers can make the experience of conducting a financial transaction on a mobile device confusing and risky. After all, one wrong click or swipe could mean money lost forever.