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Ethiopia DFN - Emerging Concept

Ethiopia DFN - Emerging Concept

Owned by Andrew Hicks (Unlicensed)
Feb 24, 2022
2 min read

Andrew’s notes from 2/23/22 meeting with Kebede, Daniel, Hawi, Shreya, Andrew:

Kebede explained again the concepts he shared with Rikin in this discussion, but in some more detail:

  • Not DFN yet, but digitizing SHG books, there are 4-5 different types to cover:

    • Passbooks, savings, bank transactions, loans, etc

    • Digitize, report, and verify transactions

    • Provide central access to the data for the officers working with them

    • DG to provide smartphone(s)

  • At coffee harvest farmers are flush with cash, but there is not a savings culture. Throughout the season they are very cash poor.

  • Digital literacy is a key first step, many of these farmers have never used a smart phone

  • There is potential to layer video dissemination via these smart phones, IVR as well

    • Idea: IVR group listening and discussion??

  • Potentially, longer term, once we have the smartphone SHGs etc going in Jimma and the farmer registry application going in DAAS we may be able to link these two systems digitally

Q&A / Discussion:

  • Key question is data for what? I.e. why are we digitizing:

    • Per Kebede, four reasons:

      1. Reduce duplication of efforts - lots of copying records, moving paper around, etc

      2. Make the information visible - the officers working with SHGs don’t have a view of their progress without inspecting the paper books

      3. Access to other financial services - credit history or some financial background can help the groups access banks / MFIs

      4. Market access by sharing info with traders – potential KDE link here

        1. Ex: Honey producers - link to traders for bulk selling of group’s honey

  • Things to plan ahead for:

    • Scalable and expandable data model - plan is to start simple, build something scalable that replicates the existing processes, do that successfully (esp digital literacy piece), and then move to the additional data points needed for things like financial services etc

      • Rapid design - deploy quickly - learn - iterate

  • The budget allocated to Eth DFN from unrestricted:

    • Can it be used to purchase things like additional smart phones, computers, transportation for the partners in gov’t? >>> basically it can be used to do what is needed to enable a concept that moves towards some convergence across DFN, heavily tailored to Ethiopia