India’s Blanket Approach to Financial Inclusion Is Leaving Women Behind
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 8:12 am
In our second Innovation Challenge, rather than focusing on LMD-led innovations that companies can replicate, we focused on business services that distributors can affordably access. We supported five partnerships between service providers and LMDs, all aiming to develop digital solutions specifically for distributors: These solutions offered better ways of remotely managing a salesforce, selling online, assessing customer credit-worthiness and providing consumer finance.
Until recently, digital service providers have not catered to the needs of LMDs: When the sector was nascent, it did not make sense to tailor software solutions for such a small market. As a result, distributors have often been forced to build their own solutions. But as recent research from Solaris Offgrid and Enable Digital has found, most LMDs would prefer to buy off-the-shelf solutions, because of the complexity of functionalities that distributors require, and the difficulty in recruiting experienced IT staff to develop and manage tailor-made solutions.
More digital service providers are emerging to meet this gap, as reflected by the growing number of entries to our Digital Service Catalogue – which, at the time of writing, featured 77 solutions. Our second Innovation Challenge aimed to accelerate this trend, by helping service providers to more deeply understand LMDs’ needs and to develop bespoke solutions. While cambodia whatsapp number data it is still early days, initial results are promising, as shown by the following two examples:
Digital service provider Sevi learned from working with LMD Econome that women members of informal savings/lending groups (Econome’s primary consumer base) were not able to navigate through Sevi’s “Order Now, Pay Later” app independently. So Sevi enhanced the app to allow sales agents to be the primary users. Econome sales agents now sit with consumers as they look at what’s on offer in their e-commerce environment, then they review the credit plans that Econome provides and create the order on behalf of the customer.
Digital service provider Maad responded to the needs of Vitalite Senegal, the LMD they partnered with, by reworking their pricing model. Maad has traditionally used a pay-per-agent subscription model, but this did not make sense for Vitalite Senegal, since not all of their sales agents are actively selling every month. So Maad designed a bucket pricing model with fixed monthly fees, to ensure Vitalite Senegal would not pay fees for inactive agents – an approach that also made the service more affordable for other LMDs that use this kind of sales agent model.
Both Sevi and Maad intend to commercialise these services for the broader LMD market, and there is strong interest from LMDs in adopting these and other digital services developed via the Innovation Challenge. For example, in a recent webinar showcasing two of the innovations we supported, 90% of LMDs stated that they were likely or very likely to apply the ideas or learnings in their business.
Until recently, digital service providers have not catered to the needs of LMDs: When the sector was nascent, it did not make sense to tailor software solutions for such a small market. As a result, distributors have often been forced to build their own solutions. But as recent research from Solaris Offgrid and Enable Digital has found, most LMDs would prefer to buy off-the-shelf solutions, because of the complexity of functionalities that distributors require, and the difficulty in recruiting experienced IT staff to develop and manage tailor-made solutions.
More digital service providers are emerging to meet this gap, as reflected by the growing number of entries to our Digital Service Catalogue – which, at the time of writing, featured 77 solutions. Our second Innovation Challenge aimed to accelerate this trend, by helping service providers to more deeply understand LMDs’ needs and to develop bespoke solutions. While cambodia whatsapp number data it is still early days, initial results are promising, as shown by the following two examples:
Digital service provider Sevi learned from working with LMD Econome that women members of informal savings/lending groups (Econome’s primary consumer base) were not able to navigate through Sevi’s “Order Now, Pay Later” app independently. So Sevi enhanced the app to allow sales agents to be the primary users. Econome sales agents now sit with consumers as they look at what’s on offer in their e-commerce environment, then they review the credit plans that Econome provides and create the order on behalf of the customer.
Digital service provider Maad responded to the needs of Vitalite Senegal, the LMD they partnered with, by reworking their pricing model. Maad has traditionally used a pay-per-agent subscription model, but this did not make sense for Vitalite Senegal, since not all of their sales agents are actively selling every month. So Maad designed a bucket pricing model with fixed monthly fees, to ensure Vitalite Senegal would not pay fees for inactive agents – an approach that also made the service more affordable for other LMDs that use this kind of sales agent model.
Both Sevi and Maad intend to commercialise these services for the broader LMD market, and there is strong interest from LMDs in adopting these and other digital services developed via the Innovation Challenge. For example, in a recent webinar showcasing two of the innovations we supported, 90% of LMDs stated that they were likely or very likely to apply the ideas or learnings in their business.