Seven lessons from the academic-industry collaboration pilots in Uganda

By Jackie Kitiibwa

“What good is engineering research with no practical relevance?” reads a post on Quora from a seemingly frustrated PhD student. The student laments that a sizable portion of the research conducted at their university seems to have limited or no real-world application. “Many of these papers seem to be published just for the sake of it,” they added. Often, the response to such sentiments is, “You never know when seemingly irrelevant research will become relevant.”

In the past few years, recognition of the need to make academia more relevant or suited to meet world problems has grown. This has led to increased interest in academic-industry collaboration (AIC). Despite the consensus on the importance of the AIC to firms, academia, and the economy, many institutions are at times reluctant to implement long-term collaborative frameworks. In cases where collaborations happen, the success and outcomes of these partnerships differ significantly.

There has hardly been research on academia and industry collaborations in Uganda, especially in the financial sector. To gain insights and support knowledge building in this area, FSD Uganda instigated a pilot of research collaborations between universities and industry associations. The initiative was conceptualised following an in-depth capacity needs assessment for financial sector industry associations. The needs assessment identified limited research skills as a significant capacity gap that limits industry associations from performing their advocacy and market facilitation roles effectively. Industry associations are unable to effectively contribute to policy formulation because of a lack of data or fail to convince policymakers towards change because of a lack of convincing evidence. Without sufficient, proven, believable, and triangulated data no headway can be made.

FSD Uganda recognises the important role that financial sector industry associations play in promoting responsible financial inclusion within their respective environments. To this end, we support the industry associations to build their institutional capacity to support and promote financial inclusion. Our focus has been on building evidence-based advocacy that can help in better policy and decision-making. We also want to empower the associations to be sustainable. This way they will be able to advocate for their members’ interests with limited dependency on donor partners or consultants.

To achieve this, each industry association was paired with an academic institution to collaborate on a topic of research that would be relevant to their respective sector clients[1]. Academic-industry collaboration is a powerful tool that promises three outcomes:

• • First, a collaboration between associations and academia is a creative and cost-effective approach that ensures that there is sustainable knowledge transfer between practitioners and researchers.
  • Secondly, such partnerships will go a long way to motivate researchers/academia to take all possible steps to collaborate with practitioners to apply what is discovered in research and could get researchers into new and interesting areas.
  • Thirdly, this approach could reorient the incentives for academicians and help achieve a better balance between conducting research and ensuring that it positively changes practice and resource allocation. This would allow academia to increase its relevance in developing solutions that can be used to solve real-world problems.

Lessons from the pilot project

1. Include AIC in the organisation’s overall strategy – AICs are resource-intensive and need significant commitment from management and staff in terms of time, funding, and human resources. Most of the projects were significantly delayed because team members were not readily available due to other commitments at work. This was common in the early stages of the projects. Staff from the different institutions were still expected to perform their daily duties while also committed to the project. Concerted efforts from the FSD Uganda team were needed to convince the institution management of the importance of the pilot and to avail resources for the teams to work effectively. It is important that such activities are included in the strategy with earmarked work plans, and sufficient funding attached to them.
2. Develop a research agenda – As would have been expected, institutions that had a structured and well-defined research agenda moved faster. Some institutions did not proceed with the research because of a lack of funds, or no operational structures to advance the work. For institutions that did not have clear research plans, considerable time and multiple back-and-forth was needed to get partners aligned on the research topics or objectives. Sometimes these had to be changed or tweaked following governance changes within an organisation. Once the funding was available, these were quick to move ahead. Market facilitators and funders should consider supporting institutions to put in place a robust research agenda before such partnerships are formed.
3. Pre-collaboration preparation and training – For AIC partnerships, the need for rigorous preparation and training is crucial. While the inception of the project included training on research skills it became evident during the implementation of the project that training on other softer skills like how to handle partnerships, negotiation skills, communication, and project management were equally and, in some cases, more essential. On the flip side, while some teams found the inception research training basic, teams that were relatively new to research struggled to comprehend the concepts. A pre-training needs assessment is therefore imperative to understand gaps and customise the training accordingly.
4. Choosing the right partner – Expectedly, partners who had worked together before were able to move faster than those with no partnership history. Surprisingly, in one of the collaborations, project activities progressed well even without prior collaboration amongst the team largely due to the strong engagement of the project leader and good team composition. Having a strong project leader with great stakeholder management skills was the key success driver for such collaborations.
5. Funding – Outlining and emphasising the purpose of the funding for the research was important for both industry and academic teams. There was a notion that the funding was intended as professional fees for a consultancy. This brought about misalignment in expectations with some teams dissatisfied with the meagre stipend provided for the research activities. As a facilitator, FSD Uganda envisaged that the payout was meant to offset some of the costs and facilitate smaller expenses for the research. The expectation was that participant institutions would provide additional funding to support the project. However, it is important to note that most institutions had not budgeted for this project, and it was, justifiably, challenging to mobilise the funds. FSD Uganda also wanted to test if such collaborations would help limit the need for local industry players to hire expensive consultants.
6. Roles and responsibilities – It is critical to articulate the roles and responsibilities of the institutions and the team members. For each of the partnerships, the roles and responsibilities were different. Some viewed the academic and industry as equal partners. But while they worked together to develop the instruments and define the scope of work and research sample – each undertook the survey work independently. Other collaborations involved the academic teams conducting the research while the association reviewed the tools and reports and provided comments. These two approaches were not considered ideal as we realised it limited knowledge transfer for academia to learn from industry and vice versa. A better model was the academic team working closely with the industry, handholding them where necessary through the process. This collaboration resulted in marked knowledge transfer and there was a lot of growth evidenced by the team members.
7. Collaboration Agreements – Each collaboration had different partnership arrangements. This was caused by many factors some of which included – the institution’s internal policies and processes, and whether there was an existing collaboration arrangement between the two institutions. FSD Uganda’s internal agreements also played a part in providing a framework from which these agreements were drawn. For collaborations that existed before, the partners decided on how the research funds would be split amongst themselves. Despite such arrangements, there were some disagreements in cost-sharing among some partners.

Academic–industry collaborations present a cost-effective and practical approach that strengthens the growth of knowledge and provides for practical relevance to real – world problems.  More such collaborations should be encouraged and supported.

[1] Links to the three studies
Agent Banking Services in Western Uganda,
Effect of Covid-19 on saving groups,
Microinsurance needs for informal traders.

Refugees and financial freedom: Not yet uhuru

By Joseph Sanjula Lutwama and Brenda Banura

The state of refugee’s financial inclusion
This year’s World Refugee Day theme is finding freedom. An enormous aspect of freedom is financial independence. Access to formal financial services goes a long way in facilitating financial independence given its potential in supporting one to generate more income.

But it is not yet uhuru, for refugee communities in Uganda going by the recent findings from a survey of refugee communities in Uganda commissioned by the Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSD Uganda). According to this survey, six out of every ten refugees keep their money at home. About half of the refugee community saves with informal savings groups. Less than two out of every ten refugees save with either a formal bank or Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisation (SACCO). This informality among the refugee communities not only puts their financial investments at risk but also limits their ability to maximise their potential to tap into economic opportunities.

FSD Uganda’s endline report for the Financial Inclusion for Refugees (FI4R) project reports that not more than two out of every ten refugees have access to formal financial services. The rest either keep their money at home or with village saving groups. It also reports that about a third of the refugees (29%) use mobile money.

While the village loans and savings groups are convenient and easily accessible, they are not regulated, putting their hard-earned savings at great risk of theft and all manner of misconduct.

A case for formality
Since they are regulated, formal financial institutions provide more customer safeguards, and their deeper pools of capital enable businesses, and individual customers to create a path for steady growth and development.

Unlike community-based informal savings and loan groups which are largely socially driven, and heavily reliant on informal social community networks, formal financial institutions are not constrained by capital, and human capabilities to support their customers on their journey of growth. There are more opportunities for growing to scale for customers of formal financial institutions as they can leverage the different networks and the diverse product portfolios these institutions provide.

A path to formal identification
It is therefore critical to support the refugee communities to chart a path towards formality to enable them to tap into the immense opportunities the formal sector provides. This starts with acquiring a secure, verifiable, and recognised identification. For a long time, the refugee community has struggled with the challenge of identification with no standardised form of identification for a refugee. Identification is the first entry point into the formal sector as formal institutions are only comfortable dealing with people they can identify and hold accountable. Considering that refugees are always on the move, the identity risk becomes even more critical as one is not certain that the person, they are dealing with will not have moved to another location the next day.

The office of the prime minister and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees who are responsible for the welfare of the refugee community in Uganda, have since zeroed down on a uniform identification for refugees in Uganda. They have gone further to provide formal financial institutions with access to the database of refugees in Uganda making it easier to verify and authenticate the identities of refugee customers. This has greatly enhanced the opportunities for accessing formal financial services in the refugee community.

Digitisation to unlock formal financing opportunities
Technology will also play a critical role in the formalisation of refugee communities. The high levels of access to mobile phones provide an immense opportunity to leverage the mobile telecommunications infrastructure to link the informal savings and loan groups to formal financial institutions. This creates a link to the formal financial system whilst maintaining the social fabric of the community groups.

As part of the Financial Inclusion for Refugees intervention, FSD Uganda and FSD Africa partnered with Rural Finance Initiative (RUFI) to digitise informal community savings groups. This enabled the savings groups to not only guarantee the safety of members’ savings on a more secure mobile digital platform than the metal boxes previously used but also increased access to formal financial savings through the group account with Centenary Bank.

Over the three-year partnership with RUFI, over 100 community savings and credit groups were digitised, and close to 2,000 members were able to receive formal credit.

Agent banking: bringing formal financial services closer to the refugees
Previously, refugees had to travel long distances to access financial services from formal financial institution branches, usually located far from the refugee settlements. However, the emergence of agency banking has made it possible to bring the services of formal financial institutions closer to the refugee communities.

While implementing the intervention, FSD Uganda and FSD Africa were able to test the efficacy of rolling out bank agents within the refugee communities and their impact on access to formal financial services. This was in partnership with Equity Bank which set up over 200 bank agents within the refugee communities. Over the three-year period of the partnership, Equity Bank enrolled a total of 108,391 refugee households on the Agency Banking Platform.

Over the same period, the bank made over 1 million digital payments to these households to a tune of over Ushs 120 million (USD 32,000). Much more headway was made with digital merchant payments reporting over Ushs 3 billion (USD 800,000) transacted through the Equity Bank digital platform.

Not Yet uhuru
Despite a clear demonstration of a need for formal financial services within the refugee communities, a lot more has to be done for the refugees to maximise the opportunities that come with formal financial services.

The agency banking points are largely utilised to receive cash transfers from the World Food Programme (WFP), which is not sustainable because development assistance is unpredictable. This was demonstrated by a reduction in the amount of cash transfers WFP was advancing the refugees in 2020, the amount could be reduced further.

The refugee communities need to be supported to engage in more formal economic activities that will generate more sustainable employment opportunities and income streams which will ultimately translate into higher levels of effective demand for a diversity of financial services from savings, credit, investments, and insurance to name but a few.

Further, digitisation continues to be a challenge due to the high levels of digital illiteracy among the refugee communities which lengthens the duration of the adoption of digital products. The cost of digitisation and digital transactions remains high which is further worsened by irregular network connectivity in the rural areas where refugees predominately reside.

Women’s financial inclusion and the tomato value chain

By Anthea Paelo, Ph.D

Despite the proliferation of supermarkets and delivery apps intended to increase convenience whilst shopping, I refuse to give up my relationship with my market lady, Maureen. Maureen and I have an understanding. I buy fresh fruits and vegetables from only her, and she, in turn, provides me with the best produce available. She procures the right size of produce, at the correct level of ripeness, and at a price we are both comfortable with. I am also a frequent beneficiary of the odd pawpaw, watermelon, or jackfruit at no charge, earning Maureen my unwavering loyalty.

Many fresh produce shoppers in Uganda have a market lady. Aside from the produce, they provide additional customer care that makes them irreplaceable. Unsurprisingly, women have become the face of the fresh produce market everywhere. But are these women earning proportionate financial compensation from their role in the agricultural value chain?

In 2022, FSD Uganda, with support from the FSD Network’s Gender Corpro, commissioned a rapid gender assessment of Uganda’s tomato value chain. The study sought to identify opportunities and understand women’s roles in this value chain.

The assessment found that women were more visible in two areas of the tomato value chain: production and retail, i.e., farming and sale to the final consumer. Men were more involved in tasks requiring additional capital and labour investment. Their visibility was prevalent as aggregators and middlemen in the tomato supply chain.

Women’s visibility and presence in the production and retail segments are due to structural and social factors. First, women have limited ownership of land and other key assets. This limits their ability to access credit to purchase inputs and machinery to improve production outputs.

Second, women often lack the knowledge, experience, and networks to participate at the trading level as middlemen.

An additional challenge limiting women’s ability to participate in other, more lucrative segments of the supply chain lies in the limited time resources to engage in these activities at a commercial level. Women, on average, spend about 5.2 hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work compared to the 1.2 hours a day that men spend.

The benefit of market vending is that the capital requirement is small compared to the value chain’s input supply, production, and trading segments. Through their local Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs), women can save and borrow small amounts of capital to put up stalls to earn small amounts of income. Additionally, they can still perform domestic tasks, such as childcare, because they are stationed in one place. Due to the highly competitive nature of the marketplace, women often focus on providing quality customer care to attract and keep customers.

While it may be some time before social norms that limit women’s ability to participate and earn from the whole value chain are overcome, some wins are possible regarding access to financial services. A key route is strengthening the VSLAs and Saving and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) through which many women access financial services. In January 2023, Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority (UMRA) Operational Guidelines for Self-Help Groups (SHGs) took effect. The guidelines aim to provide structure, promote fair and equitable practices, and provide financial stabilisation mechanisms to even small self-help groups.

A second opportunity arises in the growth of digital financial services. VSLAs and SACCOs can digitise their transactions and based on this information, develop credit scores that could be used for loans. Rather than depending on physical collateral or being limited by the resources of the savings group, women can borrow more significant amounts of cash for use in agricultural activities based on their behaviour and spending patterns.

With the developments in the legal framework and the uptake of technology for financial services, we may find increased visibility and participation of women such as Maureen in the tomato supply chain and other agricultural segments. Increased involvement of women across these segments increases their potential income and contributes to a more sustainable economic livelihood.

 

The Role of Financial Inclusion in Bridging the Gender Gap

By Caroline Agaba

The government of Uganda has made efforts to address gender issues for example through the development of a National Gender Policy in 1997. The policy provides a framework for addressing gender imbalances. Unfortunately, this policy was last reviewed in 2007 which demonstrates that more must be done to close the gender gap.

The gender gap manifests in different ways. One such way is that women have a lower social status than men. This means they have less power to make decisions, get an education, obtain a profitable job, and be independent.

What the data says

According to the 2022 World Bank Gender Statistics, in Uganda, the labour force participation rate is 67.6% and 72% among females and males respectively. The Sub Sahara Africa average of labour participation for women is 60.4%. Adult literacy in Uganda is lower among women at 74% compared to men at 84%. 25.1% of girls in Uganda complete lower secondary education compared to the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 43%. In terms of decision making only 51.1% of women participated in making major decisions in the household as of 2016 data. For asset ownership, 62% of women did not own a house compared to 44% of men.

This shows that gender inequality in Uganda revolves around education, asset ownership, and participation in the workforce. To close the gender gap, strategies to address these three key issues need to be developed.

One way gender inequalities can be addressed is through the economic empowerment of women through financial inclusion. Financial inclusion in and of itself may not be the sole solution to all the gender inequality issues in Uganda since many of them are rooted in social norms and beliefs about women and their role in society. However, there is evidence from various studies about how access to financial services can help close the gender gap in education, asset ownership, and labour participation.

How savings accounts can help.

In 2013, Silvia Prina conducted a study on banking of the poor via savings accounts in Nepal. In this study access to a simple, liquid bank account—with no opening, maintenance, or withdrawal fees—was randomly offered to a sample of 1,118 female household heads in 19 slums in Nepal. Through this experiment, the impact of access to the bank account on household saving behaviour, asset accumulation, expenditures, and income was assessed.

The study found that being offered access to a savings account strongly increased household investment in health and education, and the investment in human capital in the form of textbooks and school uniforms rose by more than 50%.

Education is a fundamental pathway toward social and economic progress. The study findings demonstrate that access to financial services empowers women to tap into the transformative potential of education for their children and themselves. This is done by using their savings to cover school fees, educational materials, and additional learning opportunities. Enabling women to invest in education through financial inclusion initiatives can help them break the cycle of poverty and create brighter futures for themselves and their communities.

Other findings from the study showed that access to the savings account increased monetary assets by more than 50%. In addition, total assets, which include monetary and non-monetary assets (consumer durables and livestock), grew by 16%. This suggests access to financial services can play a key role in helping women invest in their future and build up their assets thus closing the asset ownership gap.

Mobile money helps women.

Another study in Kenya titled The Long-run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money by Suri T & W. Jack, showed that the impact of the introduction of mobile money in moving households out of poverty was particularly pronounced for female-headed households. The study estimated that the spread of mobile money helped raise at least 194,000 households out of extreme poverty and induced 185,000 women to switch to business or retail as their main occupation. The study suggested that the more pronounced impacts on female households, appeared to be driven by changes in financial behaviour—in particular, increased financial resilience and saving—and labour market outcomes, such as occupational choice, especially for women, who moved out of agriculture and into business. The results from these studies have important implications for policymakers and development organisations.

Financial inclusion plays a vital role in closing the gender gap and empowering women. By providing women with access to formal financial services, such as savings accounts, credit, and insurance, financial inclusion enables them to secure their economic futures, invest in education and healthcare, and start and grow businesses. It not only enhances their financial well-being but also fosters gender equality by breaking down barriers, challenging traditional norms, and promoting women’s economic independence.

Climate Adaptation Financing Practice: A Case Study of Bidhaa Sasa

By Joseph Lutwama and Douglas Karugonjo

The Climate Challenge
Uganda is among the world’s most vulnerable and least adapted to climate change countries scoring 166 out of 181 countries on the ND-GAIN Vulnerability Index in 2018^[1]. Its vulnerability has been attributed to the huge dependency on natural resources provided by primary sectors such as agriculture, water, energy, and fisheries which are highly vulnerable to impacts of climate change. Historically, Uganda was mostly dominated by a tropical climate with a single rainy season in the north and two rainy seasons in the south. The effects of climate change are affecting the seasons with the country experiencing shorter or longer rains and harsher droughts – especially in the eastern and north-eastern regions^[2].

Uganda’s most pressing agricultural risks are directly related to climate change: droughts, floods, crop/ livestock pests and diseases, post-harvest loss, hailstorms and thunderstorms, and other natural risks such as landslides. The lack of ownership and control over land and resources, and their disproportionate burden of unpaid care work, restricts access to finance, extension services, and technological innovation, especially for Ugandan women involved in farming.

These women predominantly prefer Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) to formal financial institutions for savings and credit. The high usage of informal services results in less consumer protection, fewer opportunities for women to build credit histories, and less access to structured services such as seasonal loans^[3]. To enhance opportunities for women, an efficient strategy for climate adaptation is needed.

Bidhaa Sasa Building a Case for Climate Adaptation Finance
In 2021, FSD Uganda partnered with Bidhaa Sasa, to pilot a unique business model that leverages mobile money technology and group lending to enable women to access credit for energy saving household equipment and climate adaptation tools. Bidhaa Sasa is a Kenyan last-mile distribution and finance company operating in Uganda since 2019. It offers a range of household goods that improve the quality of life of rural families such as technologies for clean lighting, clean cooking, and climate smart farming.

Integration of mobile money technology
Bihdaa Sasa’s entire credit process hinges on mobile money technology, thereby opening a door for rural buyers to develop their digital financial footprint and potentially engage in formal financial service, often for the first time. Bidhaa Sasa’s exclusive use of mobile money coupled with its digital literacy training of clients helps it to get more rural households into the digital financial services ecosystem and increase their likelihood of accessing other financial services.

Tailored credit approach
The Bidhaa Sasa business model is built around rural women’s needs. It offers a tailored credit approach that makes relevant technologies for households and farming more accessible and affordable. Low-income rural women, who form the majority of Bidhaa Sasa’s customers, are typically unbanked and lack their own collateral. With the use of the group liability model, they can acquire both life improvement products and agricultural tools via payment plans for goods that typically save time or money (solar saves kerosene, LPG gas saves time, stoves save wood or charcoal, and the quality of indoor air and health of a family improves when using both technologies) while keeping credit risks low.

The model does not require collateral (the products act as collateral) and there are no credit checks conducted because most clients, particularly women, tend not to have credit histories. However, the social capital of clients that exists in villages is leveraged to ensure timely repayment. Clients are typically organised in groups of at least five and share the liability since all act as cross-guarantors. This group liability model is well understood by women who are already very active in several self-help or socially-minded groups.

This intervention enables rural households to improve their productivity at home and in their farms through ownership and use of relevant technologies. For example, an improved cookstove uses less than half the charcoal the user would normally use saving them up to $200 per year. In addition, the use of solar technology and improved cookstoves reduces or eliminates the use of non-sustainable fuels like kerosene and charcoal.

The quality of indoor air and health of the family improves when using solar for lighting and improved cookstoves for cooking. In rural Uganda for example, a single efficient charcoal stove can avoid 3 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year when continuously used.

From a climate adaptation perspective, Bidhaa Sasa also provides Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bags also known as hematic bags as part of their product portfolio. Hematic bags are an affordable and effective approach to minimising post-harvest losses for farmers. Hermetic storage is airtight and works by restricting organisms such as insects and microorganisms that can damage stored commodities from thriving in its internal atmosphere by keeping its oxygen levels low. Hermetic storage is also flood-proof.

The Impact
Over a two-year period, Bidhaa Sasa has been able to support 2,206 low-income customers access energy saving equipment and climate adaptation agricultural tools. Canvases and hematic bags accounted for the biggest proportion (42 percent) of the goods sold. Over 50 percent of Bidha Sasa’s customers have been women. The overall loan payment performance over the period stood at an average of 10.6 percent PAR >30 with the female slightly lower at 7.2 percent PAR >30.

It is clear from the case of Bidhaa Sasa that social networks within rural communities once integrated with mobile money technology can deliver positive climate adaptation and mitigation solutions for both rural households and their farms.

REFERENCES

[1] The index summarizes a country vulnerability to climate change and other challenges in combination with its readiness to improve resilience.
[2] The International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2021
[3] Financial Protection Forum, 2019. VSLA: Village Savings and Loan Associations.

How to narrow the gender gap in digital agricultural platforms

By Geoffrey Okidi
While digital agricultural platforms can boost farmer productivity, they also risk entrenching gender inequalities if not gender intentional. Research shows that only 25% of Sub-Saharan Africa digital agricultural platform users are women, and they are not served sufficiently.

Based on the best practices framework for incorporating gender into digital agricultural platforms developed by ISF Advisors and Value for Women (VfW) with support from Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) (December 2022), this blog identifies four key opportunities to create shared value for platforms and the women that engage with them.

1. Embedding gender into the organisational strategy: To become gender intentional, a good place to start is for the platform to develop a holistic gender strategy, with clear objectives and targets defined using their data. This will enable the platform to unlock new market opportunities, improve organisational performance, and reach scale more quickly. The gender strategy should include key performance indicators to assess progress towards targets, and measure success (e.g., active usage, disaggregated by sex, measured quarterly; percentage of women in leadership, measured annually).With the gender strategy in hand, the platform should then develop a gender action plan, outlining specific actions that need to be implemented to reach the gender goals outlined in the strategy (with roles/ responsibilities, allocated resources/ budget, and the timeline for completion of each action).
2. Leveraging sex-disaggregated data for better decision-making: The collection and analysis of sex-disaggregated data is the typical starting point for increasing gender inclusion inside a company and through its products and services. Data can tell how many women a platform is serving, how well it is serving women, and the value being generated by women as customers and/or agents. Therefore, a systematic approach to data collection and data-driven decision-making can help platforms leverage their data for commercial and gender outcomes. Platforms can start to do this through the following:a) Target setting and prioritisation: Once a platform has defined their gender strategy and associated key performance indicators, they should establish a strategy-priorities-targets-measurement system centered around data. This will enable action on priorities.
   b) Understanding customer patterns: An important step is for platforms to sex-disaggregate existing data– such as customer ratings or satisfaction scores –to understand satisfaction levels for different sub-segments of women (and other users, such as men and youth). Platforms can also collect data through publicly available datasets, focus groups, and feedback pop-ups on the platform.
   c) Designing products: Insight into customer patterns from the preceding action can then be leveraged in the product design process. This could result in finding ‘quick wins’ (i.e., shifting land requirements from individual names to family names given barriers for women to access land) or more robust product shifts (i.e., designing products specifically for women
3. Experimenting with women-focused innovations: Platforms can leverage their own data and industry leading practices to continuously innovate. A good place to start is by looking at the current platform offering with a gender lens to determine if there are any “quick wins” that can be achieved. Collecting user feedback on the offerings available and sex-disaggregating these findings could be helpful. Based on the context and platform model, there are promising platform innovations that provide inspiration. For example
   i. Use of in-person agents to increase registration for digital marketplaces (e.g., DigiFarm Village Advisors)
   ii. Use of interactive features, such as Interactive Voice Response technology, to make digital tools easier to use by digitally illiterate customers and to deliver capacity building and advisory to customers (e.g., Opportunity International Uganda)
   iii. Offering preferential terms to users earning income on the platform (e.g., zero registration fees, referral bonuses) as an incentive to onboard rural women customers (e.g., Jumia’s Women & Youth Empowerment Program)
   iv. Providing tailored training and services to increase the income-generating potential of women platform users (e.g., Copia’s asset financing product)Rural women should be embedded throughout the product and service design process. Concretely, this means including a representative sample of both men and women customers in market research efforts, testing prototypes with women, and collecting sex-disaggregated feedback.
4. Increasing income generating opportunities for women as service providers: Evidence shows that women tend to be successful field agents. An IFC study of agent transactions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (May 2016) found that women were significantly more successful than male agents in terms of volume and value of transactions. The abundance of platform field-based positions provides a unique opportunity for women to integrate into more formalised labour, expand their earning potential, and pursue a career that works with their household responsibilities and personal aspirations.Of note is that capacity building is key to supporting women who earn an income on the platform. Tailored support could include:
   i) Providing digital literacy training,
   ii) Training on how to use the platform,
   iii) Value-added financial services (e.g., credit, insurance, or savings products),
   iv) Providing assets necessary for livelihoods earned on the platform (e.g., smartphones,
   v) Access to support networks within the platform ecosystem