Our approach for tackling this challenge

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According to 2017 Findex data, men are twice as likely as women to have access to both a mobile phone and internet in Bangladesh. Because women living in rural areas of the country haven’t historically been the primary operators of their own mobile devices, making them comfortable using a phone to transact requires more time and energy than introducing the bKash app to an urban digital native who is already familiar with online games and social media. So from the perspective of the financial service provider, women living in rural Bangladesh are more costly to acquire as customers.

Furthermore, while IDEO.org’s research shows that women do a significant portion of the household saving in Bangladesh and other emerging markets, their financial activities and knowledge are not typically acknowledged by family members or the formal financial sector, and the broader society views finance as the domain of men. In Bangladesh, because women have been traditionally excluded from formal finance, their ability to make transactions via a digital financial services app is generally lower than that of men – and rural women’s ability to navigate these apps is generally lower than their urban counterparts. For the financial service provider, this means that once rural women are acquired as customers, they are not expected to transact often or in large amounts.



Our starting point for this project was immersive design research that helped us identify an opportunity to build onramps to digital finance that would let women learn, and even play, while building their confidence to complete digital transactions. While there’s a lot to be said for in-app tutorials, which provide digital handholding for new users, we saw a cambodia whatsapp number data need in this scenario to create physical spaces that normalize women’s use of their phones to make financial transactions.

For bKash, creating and operating these spaces in rural Bangladesh would require a major investment, and the development of new organizational capabilities. That’s why we were fortunate that this partnership involved BRAC, an NGO that already had the rural presence and community credibility to convene women, and a vested interest in building financial confidence among them. Through this partnership, we hoped to build a service that would both address the needs of women, and unlock business viability in the process. So, in collaboration with BRAC’s Social Innovation Lab team and bKash, we created BRAC Shakti.



The BRAC Shakti Model
BRAC Shakti is a digital savings group through which rural women in Bangladesh form “pods” of five or six members, who collectively agree on a weekly savings goal and meet each week to contribute money towards that goal, and to learn about navigating household finances and using digital financial services. During the gatherings, an “Appa” (or big sister) works in partnership with a BRAC field officer to facilitate role plays, trainings and Q&A sessions, all intended to familiarize women with transacting digitally – in this case using the bKash app.