TOOLKITS Digital Financial Inclusion Toolkit
i

This is a prototype. Please bear with us while we complete it.
Active Filters:

Financial bookkeeping micro courses to boost women entrepreneurs’ business confidence

What it does: This is a simple digital intervention that can assist entrepreneurs, especially women, to understand the core tenets of financial bookkeeping, a cornerstone for both business success, and the confidence needed to make financial decisions, take risks, and pitch successfully. The intervention is built around behavioral research that followed 19 women entrepreneurs in Lebanon for a year as they took part in an economic empowerment program for women. Observing the participants in this programme provided sufficient data to build the pilot of a micro email course on book-keeping. business decisions.

Value proposition: By using the different components of the “Micro email course” you will enable any partner to:

  1. Drastically improve the quality and relevance of recruits to women economic empowerment programs. The nature of digital online campaigns targeted at one demographic like “Women in Lebanon aged 18 to 45” allows for the call to action to be displayed to large numbers of women through online media, and the advantage is the ones that sign up and go through a 5-minute survey have been filtered for the “appetite” to participate.
  2. Ensure wide scale education on core financial literacy components in a localized manner, which is the pre-requisite to financial decision making and investment acumen on the long run.
  3. Attain quantitativelu and qualitatively significant data on interest, adoption, and completion. The medium of email for delivery creates high levels of engagement if well designed, and it also allows a detailed M&E view on the intervention from the perspective of move from “what could get women interested in this topic (via which ads they click on)” to “How many registered women in this email course went on to open all 7 emails and qualify for the free excel sheet reward?”

This intervention uses digital learning journeys to deliver on two of UNDP’s signature solutions by tackling inequality of opportunities (Poverty & inequality) while also being deliberate about focusing on women with digital access (Gender equality) as the audience to grow and impact. It also contributes to Sustainable Development Goals 5 (gender equality) and 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure).

Why and when to use it: This email course journey is most useful when a program is aiming to recruit and identify an entrepreneur profile within a specific demographic while also understanding their localized pain points and learning gaps when it comes to financial literacy, as well as its relationship to delaying the achievement of that group of people’s business goals and financial stability or growth. The resources below are directly re-usable for a target group of Arabic-speaking female entrepreneurs in Lebanon. However, the tactics, journey, and financial literacy building blocks are transferable to other settings as well, as long as they have the same need for bookkeeping literacy and access to email.

Finally, it is useful to recruit large numbers of people into a course journey, while also using the engagement journey of the course in order to achieve high fidelity tools to monitor and, later, evaluate the participants’ appetite for, understanding of, and completion of the course.

Known issues and troubleshooting: For this tool to work you will require:

  1. Some contact list or a media outlet that can broadcast the recruitment call.
  2. Any email sending platform.
  3. A local or regional success that can be the “modeling agent” of the micro learning content.

Context: In 2021, the UNDP Lebanon Accelerator Lab participated in a one year-long behavioral research effort with 19 Lebanese female entrepreneurs. The research singled out financial bookkeeping as an area of ill confidence, worry, and difficulty for all women. Building on these insights, and in partnership with the Regional Bureau of Arab States’ innovation unit, the Lab conducted structured interviews to assess more precisely the particiapants’ needs. This work powered the design of a bookkeeping course that speaks to the common phenomenon of time-poverty that women suffer by delivering easy, short, and localized video content on bookkeeping by email over a period of 7 days. The content included interactive knowledge testing, and a free reward upon completion.

The main transferrable tools used besides the course content are shared in the resources below:

  • The call for participation component used to recruit a defined target profile online through online media funnels removing middlemen contractors and substantial cost, while also identifying which behavioral driver or barrier had the most impact for this particular demographic.
  • Chunking of financial bookkeeping knowledge into micro “just in time” learning resources modeled on a visible excel sheet developed by a regional Arab-speaking woman entrepreneur resulted in improved engagement.
  • The offer of a free pre-programmed excel sheet (the same one used in the course content) as a reward for course completers acted as a powerful incentive to complete the course. This excel would be used to practice their learning directly on their businesses, and we attribute this incentive framing to the 21% course completion rate (5% higher than that of a similar Coursera course).

Cost: 8,000 USD to commission a regionally well-known entrepreneur to co-design the course, and to acquire from her the IP of a pre-programmed spreadsheet file that can function as a complete, if basic, mini-bookkeeping system for small businesses; 5,000 USD to recruit participants via targeted online advertising. A subscription to an email automation platform such as MailChimp or similar is also needed.

People: In Lebanon, this project involved the UNDP Accelerator Lab, the UNDP Women Economic Empowerment project, and the gender unit, as well as external consultants. The following roles are needed:

  • Local success “role model” (in a topic of choice) as content and a tool as a reward creator
  • Email automation specialist
  • Ads or PR specialist to launch the recruitment call in a manner that allows you to reach a specific target audience and allows participants to sign up to the course via survey
  • Gender specialist

Focal point: Lilian Abou Zeki.

Country, year, and language : Lebanon, Period: 2022 to 2023, Arabic.

Resources: Course step-by-step. Consists of an instruction sheet in English, with links to all emails and video lessons, as well as to an inception survey and promotion videos. All materials are in Arabic.