Insight2impact: How can we increase people’s financial health in eastern Africa?

How can we increase people’s financial health in eastern Africa?

We brought 20 financial organizations through the behavioral design process

Keywords: Behavioral economics, behavioral design, financial health, savings, international, mobile money

The Challenge

Financial knowledge and tools for well-being are not just convenient – they’re essential. Yet many people worldwide don’t have access to information and systems that help facilitate healthy financial behavior. Insight2impact is a global resource centre that seeks to improve financial inclusion through the smarter use of data. They invited us to lead a multi-day workshop to help train representatives of 20 East African companies working in the finance industry, with the goal of enabling them to make a more positive impact on their customers and communities.

The Process

In collaboration with i2i, we vetted the workshop applicants and ultimately gathered 20 top financial organizations serving communities and people across East Africa. Attendees represented banks, startups, and insurance companies like Jumo, SafeBoda, MTN, and ClinicPesa.

Before the event, we asked participants to answer a set of questions about their organizations, roles, and problems they were trying to address. This allowed us to tailor our content to the work they were doing, and also helped set their expectations about what the workshop would entail.

We spent three days working hand in hand with these organizations to help them develop a deeper understanding of how to design products and features that facilitated higher adoption, active use, and behavior change.

The goal of the workshop was to combine education and application. Instead of just teaching behavioral science, we also taught participants how to apply those insights to their work. To facilitate the ‘application’ part of the workshop, we brought people through the Behavioral Design process.

  • We used our Irrational Labs “3B Framework” of behavior change to conduct a behavioral diagnosis with each team.
  • We introduced key drivers of behavior and explained the associated behavioral solutions to overcome these core biases.
  • Teams then practiced designing solutions in ways that accounted for human biases.

Results

Our median Net Promoter score was 10 (the highest possible!).

We wanted to place a significant focus on being able to create change after participating in the workshop, so we worked with all attendees to help them create actionable insights they could take back to their workplaces. When participants were asked how likely it was that they would make a product change in the next 3 months based on their time at the workshop, their average rating was 85 out of 100.

Interested in applying behavioral science?

Read More Case Studies

Team Training

Integrate behavioral science into your organization's DNA.

Product Design

We use the psychology of decision-making to create innovative solutions that drive behavior change.

Qual & Quant Research

We use a variety of rigorous tools to assess what to build and how.