Lifecycle Design for Women with Ann-Elise Francis
Tell us about KadAfrica?
KadAfrica is a commercial passion fruit farm in Western Uganda. It trains out-of-school girls to become passionate farmers. I was the Program Director, working with girls aged 14 - 20 years, they’ve usually been out of school for a year or so or they have never been to school. 30% of these girls already had children, so school is not an option. How can young women who don’t have access to education, build their lives?
Training them with agricultural services and teaching them how to become farmers is one way. The biggest asset for farmers is their land. At KadAfrica, we’d allow land access to young women for a limited period of time – 3 years, because that’s the lifespan of passion fruit. We would work with the women directly and train her on site 3-4 days a week through a thorough curriculum.
Now they have an asset, the seedling, the resources — a startup bundle of tools to get them to their first harvest. But we quickly learned that it’s not enough until we see it through to the lifecycle, so we also found a way to buy the fruit back so they would make income.
What did you learn about designing for young women?
You have to design for their families too
We had to constantly answer the following question: how do you make these young women being out of the home worth it to their family members? We began to give away 10 seedlings to each family member and encouraged the women to pass on their training too. We began to do family gatherings so that they could have access to the agronomist as well, and ask questions – and therefore, feel safer about and get value from having the women out of the home.
Weave in a life skills component
I realised that the women in our program loved to say “I’m a business woman.” Through that, I realised how important the life-skills component is: to build up their self esteem, teach and practise healthy decision making, talking about reproductive healthcare and menstruation, teach saving skills and provide business school 101 training.
We actually started a savings club and taught them how to form savings groups, by appointing a chairperson and secretary and having a constitution. They would meet once a week and ensure that 10% of their earnings were being put away for a rainy day. We saw that the girls would automatically choose to put in more after seeing the results and learning that they only get startup capital once for their first harvest, they began to see the importance of thinking ahead.
What advice would you give to a team designing a product, service, experience or community for women?
Play out the lifecycle
A lot of programs are designed for a specific period, for example, “come to our accelerator bootcamp for 3 weeks.” That’s great, but what happens after the three weeks? You have to think about the lifecycle of the girl or the woman in the program. I do believe that this matters more for women than for men. I don’t think we’d have to give men’s families seedling, or partner with churches to acquire land for men, for example.
Design with a partnership approach
The tone we approached our programs with were different than if they were for men. It was clear that this isn’t a transaction – aside from running their business, they would run into confidence issues and we would provide mentors for that, or they would run into finance issues and they had their savings club for that, or you needed a credit assessment and we would hold their hand through their excel sheets. The human touch in our program was much higher. There was a tonality of showing that this is a partnership and that they’re walking on a journey with each other and with us and that’s a big part of the success of the program.
What are some common misconceptions about designing for women?
Helping women isn’t a charity project
This thought has to be driven into people. Many might believe: “I’m helping young women better themselves, they’re going to be so grateful” — actually, no they’re not. Especially in the social impact context, aid can play a negative role. It has led many programs to come up against end-customers who want direct access to money rather than the program itself. Design a service, not a charity project.
About Ann-Elise Francis
Ann-Elise Francis is an impact-driven leader who fiercely believes in expanding financial inclusion for underserved groups, particularly women. She has over 10 years of experience advising and building commercially scalable and sustainable businesses; six of which she has spent living in East Africa leading operations in the agriculture, payments, and inclusive insurance space.
Currently, Ann-Elise serves as the Head of Growth and Partnerships at Turaco – an inclusive insurtech start up based in East Africa providing affordable insurance to emerging marketing consumers. At Turaco, Ann-Elise oversees all business partnerships, customer communication & retention strategy, and new market expansion. Ann-Elise is also currently launching a venture debt investment fund focused on closing the financial gap for African women entrepreneurs. Prior to Turaco, Ann-Elise served as Head of Operations at BitPesa (now called Aza Finance) – a digital foreign exchange and payment platform. Prior to that, she led the impact arm of KadAfrica – a commercial passion fruit farm implementing a vertically integrated value chain by training and supporting out-of-school girls in building their own viable agro-enterprises and learning life skills in Western Uganda. Before working within startups, Ann-Elise served as Vice President of Mentorship and Strategic Partnerships at Unreasonable East Africa and Resource & Central America Program Manager at Bpeace (Business Council for Peace). In both roles, she provided business advisory services to entrepreneurs and designed accelerator programs. She holds a Bachelors in Global Studies from Loyola University Maryland.