Designing Education & Finance for Women & Girls with Uloma Ogba
Tell us about what you’re working on these days?
Give Girls a Chance (GGAC) started because a friend and I, both Nigerian women, wanted to find a way to give back. We learned that Nigeria has the highest number of out of school children in the world – about 13.2M and 60%+ of them are girls, with them either having dropped out, being pulled out by family because they’re needed in the home, or displaced by conflict and insecurity. When it comes to girls, education falls further down the rungs of the prioritisation ladder. Given the size of the problem, we saw an opportunity to add value – we felt that we could therefore test small ideas and see what had potential.
I’m also a gender & financial inclusion specialist. I was working for the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) in 2016, when the conversation about the pervasive gender gap in financial inclusion was at the forefront. I helped plan a conference to bring together experts from digital financial services from across the world, so that they could exchange learnings and stories to work on this issue. I’ve been lucky to continue working in this space with organisations such as CGAP and IFC to understand the social norms that continue to create barriers limiting women’s financial inclusion.
What have you learned about designing for girls?
Cost & money is just the first barrier, social norms must be acknowledged
While building GGAC we learned very quickly that the cost of sending girls to school was only a part of the problem. Even after you’ve removed that barrier, there are always other factors – cultural & social norms – that you need to tackle to design successfully for women. In our case, it was about making sure the family and community were engaged and that they understood the benefits of girl child education. Often if you don’t do that, they might put their girl in school for one term and pull her out again. So getting that support from the family is crucial.
Evaluate your impact beyond “numbers” – this requires holistic design
At GGAC, we could have raised money and sent a thousand girls to school. But we quickly realised real impact would emerge if we were able to build up consistency and stability for a smaller number of girls. We began to design for being able to send a hundred girls to school instead for three years. To be successful at this, we had to introduce a mentorship program so that girls could see what they can become and we got women from the local community to serve as role models and mentors. We introduced digital skills training, and sessions about menstrual hygiene and began to look at the girls’ lives outside the classroom to increase our impact.
Women are social creatures, when they get access to something, they like to share it, so designing for them has a multiplier effect
In general, men are more solitary and not necessarily likely to share what they’re experiencing with others – even with a product. Women like to share and work through things together. There is a huge difference in telling women vs. allowing them to go through an experience together. This is where the mentorship has played a big role. Apart from our success metrics of school attendance and grades, we also measure their psycho-social wellbeing and over time, we’ve found that when we place them in groups, the information they exchange is so much richer. We’re looking for ways to design that are in a group setting, to introduce a participatory approach.
Oftentimes, by reaching one girl, we’re actually reaching a whole community behind her. When we work with a community and go back to them a year later, more girls from there come up to us and say that they want to be a part of our program. This kind of informal referral system has been much more effective for us than to actively recruit girls. Girls are actively talking about how our program impacts them in a way I don’t think boys or men would.
What have you learned about designing for women from your experience in financial inclusion?
Be complementary, not disruptive
The idea that we need products to be disruptive is one that doesn’t always work. If a product becomes an additional burden to use, women won’t use it. Rather, think about how this product can fit into the woman’s lifecycle. For example, if we give women access to finance via their phones, oftentimes women aren’t the primary users of that phone. You have to take into account the cultural and societal norms. In the Middle East for instance, some women may not be allowed to use tech if it brings them in contact with men outside their families. So think about if your product would just end there and ask: what else can women do with this product, how do I make something that’s complementary to their lifestyle?
Women aren’t allowed to fail publicly
The shame of a woman’s failure reflects on the family and it’s not the same for men. This is why women are hesitant to get into business, because the risk & fear of failure is so big – not because they are inherently more risk averse than men. Society reinforces this social norm. Product designers, and financial services providers should be asking: what should this mean for my product or service? Who should financial service providers be partnering with to disrupt this norm – maybe TV shows that reach young women and older men who can then start to acknowledge the shifting of social norms. How should government and policy makers, research institutions be thinking about this?
What advice would you have for someone creating a product, service, or community for women?
Learn from best practices, but also do the research in your own context
Don’t assume that one size fits all. Just because something worked before doesn’t mean it will work again. Just because something didn't work before doesn’t mean it won’t work now. When we designed the mentorship program for GGAC, we had women traveling from the urban centers to the rural areas and we quickly learned it wasn’t sustainable. We were asking these women to go during their lunch breaks, or after work where they would get stuck in traffic. We might have the goal of being a mentorship program, but it might not look like one in Amsterdam or Johannesburg. Understand the setting you’re working in and ask: what’s the model that’s really going to work here?
Build in touchpoints to see how needs are changing
What worked in year 1 might not work in year 4 of your program. COVID is a great example of this too as the context changed the needs so much. We build in as many touch points as possible - with the girls, their families and their communities so that we can stay aware of how their needs and environments are changing – and we stay nimble enough to adjust as needed.
Invest the time to design & innovate right upfront
We’ve learned that it’s worth it to take longer to design correctly upfront — and get your partners, collaborators, and donors to agree on a longer timeline from the beginning rather than spend time “correcting” after. It’s important to get your stakeholders to understand that to get to the goals and numbers of a project proposal, you cannot skip out on the design process. It’s better to take that time to design than launching faster.
What are some common misconceptions about designing for women?
That innovation is always something “new”
I’ve found that sometimes in “looking for innovation”, we’ve already visualised what that innovation “should look like” and this can be a barrier. Sometimes innovation can be tweaking something that already exists, or cutting something down rather than adding something new. In my financial inclusion work, for example, donors felt that they had to start from the providers and get them to consider women as a viable financial segment. But it was actually the other way around—when they began to push governments, who in turn pushed the providers to start collecting gender segregated data, the providers began to see women as viable customers themselves. This was a change in the approach rather than “innovating something new.”
That women problems manifest in the same way
Problems might look the same from the surface, but often how they manifest and should be designed for is different. For example, when menstrual hygiene became a big topic, menstrual hygiene products were made free in some parts of the world, but it’s important for the solutions provider to think – what does “free” really mean and in what other ways may costs be shifted to women, and how do I account for that?
To learn more about how GGAC is designing for girls and young women in the education sector, please visit: www.givegirlsachanceng.org.
About Uloma Ogba
Uloma Ogba is the Cofounder and Executive Director of Give Girls A Chance (GGAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting underserved girls and young women in Nigeria through scholarships and mentoring, and a mix of supplemental initiatives including literacy, science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM), vocational skills training and menstrual hygiene management programs. Uloma is committed to ensuring that as many girls and young women are able to access a quality education and skills training that could potentially transform their lives and prepare them to be productive and responsible citizens in the future. To date, GGAC has funded and mentored over 100 girls and young women, reached an additional 2,000 girls and built the capacity of 5 schools through its supplemental initiatives.
Uloma is also an international development professional with over 9 years of experience working in the financial inclusion and global health sectors across Sub Saharan Africa, Europe and North America. She is currently a Senior Specialist at MarketShare Associates, a socially driven global consulting firm where she drives the firm’s engagement on financial inclusion and gender with a range of high-profile clients. Previously, she worked with the United Nations Capital Development Fund in Zambia and Rwanda and with the global health non-profit, PharmAccess, in Nigeria, Kenya and the Netherlands.