Women and Money
design research | storytelling | branding
2019, Tanzania & India
Women and Money was a two-year program to uncover systemic barriers and opportunities for low-income, rural women in accessing digital financial services. The project spanned six countries (Nigeria, Tanzania, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Kenya) and was led by IDEO.org and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I worked on the qualitative research teams in Tanzania and India. Our research was prototyping forward, testing innovative solutions in different contexts to see how cultural norms affect usability. In these contexts, feature phones (aka non touch screen phones) are the primary tool for digitally sending money and saving money. My role during the research phase was bringing prototypes to life for testing, rapid iteration, and synthesis.
After the research sprints across the six countries, we did a global synthesis to compare learnings. The output of this initiative was a data science backed research report with overarching insights and recommendations spanning the six contexts. I lead the design of the brand and worked on the storytelling team to organize, pace, and visualize the information for the report and for an exhibition held in Singapore.
