Context: In 2015, mobile money had taken off across Africa – with about 1 in 3 mobile connections in sub-Saharan Africa linked to a mobile money account that year – but digital credit, in the form of mobile money microloans, hadn’t caught up. For smallholder farmers who run their businesses on irregular, seasonal cash flows, access to credit isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s what keeps operations going between harvests. The Mastercard Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recognized the potential, and in 2016, Dalberg Design partnered with Airtel and Vodacom in Tanzania to research and design a digital credit product built specifically around farmers’ needs.

Year: 2015

What I Did: I co-led this project through Dalberg Design, working with a combined Dalberg Design and Dalberg Advisors team. We spent several weeks doing field research across rural Tanzania by talking to smallholder farmers, farmer groups, and mobile money staff and operators to understand how farming businesses actually work: the cash flow cycles, the financial pressures, the existing loan options and why they did or didn’t work. From that research, we developed design concepts for how digital credit that worked for farmers could function, and I built an Android prototype of the envisioned USSD system. We went back to rural Tanzania to test the prototypes, refined based on what we learned, and presented the final designs to the Airtel and Vodacom teams in Dar es Salaam.

What We Made: A full strategy report making the financial and business case for a digital credit offering, plus a complete set of screens and a working prototype of the USSD system, built in both Swahili and English. A project brief was published on the Rural Finance and Investment Learning Center website. Airtel and Vodacom were both pleased with the designs and implemented them quickly after, with changes made over the years as they learned more about what their customers needed. A brief describing the project was published on the Rural Finance and Investment Learning Center website as well.