Developing a women empowerment program for an international renowned NGO
By Julia
This project was a true delight to work on and I am very pleased with the ultimate recommendations that my group and I came up with. Not only were we able to present it to our client, but we were able to present it to a small group of women from the client’s economic empowerment team and it was fascinating to hear from them and learn more about some of the steps toward this program that they’re already taking.
Our final recommendations ended up being staggered to take place in a series. Because there were multiple barriers to creating a program that needed to be addressed, staggering our recommendations chronologically so that they built upon one another enabled us to address multiple roadblocks at once while also being realistic about what could theoretically be accomplished in the short term.
A few weeks after we gave our interim presentation, we learned that our client, an international renowned NGO, was already doing some surveying and needs assessment of Moldovan women to find out what financial literacy content would be most relevant to them. While we had done some research using Worldbank and OECD surveys for our interim presentation, there’s nothing like information straight from the source. To capitalize on their newly acquired research, our first recommendation was that they test whatever concepts they find are important to focus on from their needs assessment in a classroom setting. This will allow our client to get immediate feedback from participants and make any adjustments to the content necessary to make their curriculum perfect.
Our second recommendation was to create an online content hub that provides free and reliable information on the financial concepts they find to be most relevant in their classroom trial. We had multiple reasons for doing this but to me, the most compelling reason was that it tackles the issue of accessibility by creating a centralized resource for women who may be independently looking for financial literacy help. Tangentially, it also provides a taste of what the program would look like for potential partners/investors/students and it forces our client’s NGO to put their base curriculum into a compelling written format. While we didn’t give a prescriptive recommendation for when this should happen, we discussed that we could see something like this happening within about eighteen months of the initial classroom trial.
Our final recommendation, which we envisioned being the longest term effort, was to find a Financial Technology start up to partner with. We found a great study about how FinTech and Financial Literacy are symbiotic and those with stronger financial literacy knowledge are more likely to adopt new FinTech products. We had asked our client if she had ever considered a FinTech partnership at our penultimate meeting and she seemed unsure of whether or not it would be feasible. I worried that this recommendation could possibly be unrealistic, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out while we were chatting after our final presentation that our client had just had an initial meeting with a Moldovan FinTech start up that morning. It was very affirming to find out that she had also thought it was a viable option.