Antidote

At the end of the month, I’m heading to Rwanda with the Nike Foundation, as part of their Girl Effect initiative. We need to create programs and communications that empower girls, lift them out of domestic servitude.

Learning from the best: the explosion of microfinance over the last decade has made a major impact on poverty. I’ve been looking at programmes such as Grameen, FINCA, and Prodem, as well as the highly readable account by Microfinance pioneer (and now Nobel Laureate) Mohammad Yunus. Here are some things we can learn.

1. Create barriers to entry
Sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it? We all talk about accessibility, etc – why make it harder to get involved? The successful programs have a rigorous selection process, tasks to complete, and often social pressures to overcome. “This process assures that only those who are really desperate and tough will come to us,” writes Yunus. This isn’t some kind of Darwinism – it’s about doing it for yourself, building self-reliance and confidence.

2. Build real social networks
Most programs give loans to members of groups, not individuals. This is crucial to success: groups are self-formed, tight communities which creates both support and pressure on individuals. So, these programs are networks of groups, organized through regional centers – a very un-bank structure.

3. Get clear commitments
To join a group, Grameen members must sign up to the “Sixteen Decisions”, such as “We shall plan to keep our families small”, “We shall not live in dilapidated houses”, and “We shall educate our children”. These clear undertakings give “meaning and purpose”, according to Yunus, “We never imagined how deeply these decisions would sink into the hearts of our members”.

4. Succeed early
People with loans start paying back small amounts straight away – part of “confidence-building measures”": they’re comforted and encouraged that they can manage the debt, and this gives them an early sense of achievement, strengthening their resolve.

5. Give them trust
These programs work on trust; the poor don’t have collateral. Yunus says, “the meaning of the word ‘credit’ is ‘trust’. And yet over the years, commercial banking has built its entire commercial edifice on the basis of mutual distrust”. It pays off: the borrowers are given self-respect, and amazingly their default rates are lower than conventional banks.

The themes that come out of this will be really relevant to our work: self-reliance, confidence, commitments, success, trust – sounds like a formula for empowerment, doesn’t it?

Image of a Rwandan girl from Adam Bacher

Watch out for this buzzphrase: constraint-storming. It comes from a UX consultancy called Adaptive Path, who stumbled across the idea when they realized their brain-storming wasn’t getting them anywhere.

It’s a simple idea: instead of overdosing on can-do and what-if, try a short sharp dose of harsh can’t-do realism. It’s sounds like a good way of getting your head around a situation. Certainly, the UX crowd seem at home with this kind of thinking; see Dan Brown’s Taxonomy of Constraints (it’s more interesting than it sounds).

Important to remember, though – some constraints are in our heads. Mohamad Yunus, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize for inventing micro-finance, started out by identifying some of the mental constraints that stop banks lending to the poor, such as:

• they can’t generate income because they don’t have any training
• they can’t save
• they’ve got no aspirations – they’re conditioned to poverty
• they’re too desperate to make rational decisions
• they enjoy servitude, it makes them feel secure
• they’re in the habit of consuming everything they get

Identifying these false beliefs was crucial in developing the microfinance scheme: why and how money is lent, how much, how it’s collected, etc.

It made me think about my Nike Foundation work. I’ve been putting together a research project for Rwanda, Ethiopia and northern Nigeria – the aim being to bring economic empowerment to girls. So far, we know three “trap doors” that stop girls becoming empowered young women:

1. they get pregnant really young
2. they get married really young
3. they don’t finish school

We want to identify communications and interventions that could slam these trapdoors shut. Maybe we could use the research do some “constraint-storming” around these issues: understand the barriers, mental and physical, social, economic and environmental. It might help us really get to grips with what’s going on.

Images from Shazow and Vanity Fair.