Projects

Learn about our recent work in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Gender and Financial Education Trainings in Sénegal

During two days, in March 2023, Althaë worked with teams from Baobab Senegal and trained trainers on the basic concepts of gender as well as key financial education material and tools that they can share with women entrepreneurs among their clients. Often women entrepreneurs are undervalued, underserved while providing vital economic lifelines to their families and communities. This training will allow Baobab to better serve women entrepreneurs in Senegal. Learn more about this project in our lastest blog post “Discussing Gender in Senegal.”

How IDs Create Opportunities for Women

IDs can unlock so many benefits for women and girls: access to loans, financial services, land, education, health, political representation. Yet over 1 billion adults worldwide don’t have one. For women, getting an ID is complicated, expensive and long. Take a quick read of the policy brief to learn the key obstacles and solutions or take a deeper dive in the technical report that also includes two case studies on the special situation of refugee women and the promise and risks of digital IDs. There is so much power in an ID card, every woman and girl should have one.

Women Traders in Senegal

For decades, women have been travelling outside of Senegal and taking advantage of those trips to trade goods. As traveling becomes cheaper, they travel farther, more often and are creating new business models. Through this project, Althaë provided Capital Plus with a market assessment and insights into women traders’ lives, businesses and aspirations for the future. (report proprietary)

Evaluating innovation in Ghana

Sinapi Aba, one of Ghana’s leading microfinance institutions has created an innovative credit product broadening the types of assets women can bring as collateral to secure a loan, making it easier for busy entrepreneures to get the loan they need to grow their businesses. (report forthcoming)

GIFT: Investing in Women in Senegal
WOCCU (World Council of Credit Unions) worked with Sophie to design a gender lens investment framework. The project, funded by USAID Invest brought together a network of credit unions in Senegal to test ways to put more money in the hands of women.
Quickly, three main issues arose:
1) **Credit products and process** were not working for women;
2) **Women entrepreneurs** lacked information, training and support; and
3) Women entrepreneurs, members of the credit unions, and staff had **no networking and skills building opportunities.**
In a co-creation process with UM-Pamecas, a large credit network of 28 credit unions and 600,000 members, we designed tools that created real change for women.
**Better credit products** with lower collateral and higher ceilings;
**Formalisation kit** to help women move into the formal sector where they can have bigger loans, training, and market opportunities
**Links to a global network** of women.
The project created a dozen of tools to better understand women entrepreneurs’ needs, their businesses, give simple tools to credit committees to track how much they lend to women and provide the whole network with an overall framework that they can use to continue better serving women.

Hey Sister! Show me the Mobile Money!

A free, audio-based digital financial curriculum with proven results increases women’s confidence and their use of digital financial services. Sophie worked with Strategic Impact Advisors to develop this campaign originally launched in Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda through IVR platforms, the 23 dramatized episodes give the basics of how to transact safely on a mobile phone. The stories follow three friends, teaching each other how to save and borrow, recognize a scam, make payments, etc, using their phones. Available in English, French and Spanish, and a dozen languages local to Uganda, Ghana, Malawi, Rwanda and Kenya, the episodes have been listened to by over 230,000 people. 52% of the women groups interviewed opened a mobile money account, 40% started saving online for the first time and 93% took action when they saw a suspicious message. MTN in Ghana, the country’s largest mobile operator, partnered with SIA to offer Hey Sister! to its wide customer base. The project was funded by USAID and will continued to be accessible online at no cost on Strategic Impact Advisors’ website.

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Gender Assessment
How do organizations know they are getting better at including women? In 2019, we worked with Access Alliance to design a gender assessment that examines both internal practices relating to the representation of women in management, executive committee and board, as well as how the company serves its feminine clientele. We used and tweaked existing tools to assess the data of three MFIs in Ghana and the DRC and made recommendations to help them deepen their commitment to becoming gender transformative organizations, In 2022 we were asked to do a follow-on assessment with the same organizations. Of course, Covid-19 was a major disruption, but overall, we observe a mind shift: training staff and clients on basic gender concepts so everyone has the same language; look in staff to find unrecognized, undervalued talented women and promote them and meet client where they are by offering them financial products that they value and trainings that they want.

Financial Inclusion Week 2021

Making Women the Heart of Finance: A GLI Case Study in Senegal

FinEquity Annual Meeting 2021

Making Women the Heart of Finance in Senegal: The Journey of Member Nogaye Neck

Contributions & Presentations

Women's Rights in the Cocoa Sector

This report provides examples of emerging good practice to address gender equality in the cocoa sector and where there is potential to make even greater change. (Contributor)

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Saving for a Rainless Day: Microfinancing for Resilience

Microfinance initiatives like microsavings groups touch the lives of over 10 million individuals every day, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. But the industry could reach many millions more who lack access to traditional forms of banking and finance.

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