Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 1

Designing products and services for empowerment

Linda Mayoux

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 2

What is FALS?

a client-led methodology which brings clients and financial service providers

(FSPs) together as partners in developing empowering and

financially sustainable products and services.

Integrates:

• product design and market research

• client financial empowerment

• social performance management.

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 3

Underlying win-win assumptions

Sustainable FSPs

Sustainable households

Gender equity

Sustainable development

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 4

Key features

• starts with client visions, aspirations and strategies

• mainstreams analysis of intra-household relations and gender inequalities

• clients keep their own individual diaries

• upscaled mainly through peer learning

• basis for ‘relational marketing’ of products

• financially sustainable

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 5

Tools

Tool 2: Financial Opportunities and Challenges Circle Maps

Tool 5: Financial Planning ‘Multilane Highway’

Tool 3: Financial Management Challenge Action Tree

Tool 4: Financial Flow Trees

Tool 6: Financial

Sustainability ‘win-win’ diamond

Tool 1: Wealth Creation and Empowerment Road Journey

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 6

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 7

Tool 2: Financial and social resource mapping

• Financial mapping

• Empowerment/relationship mapping

• Market and value chain mapping

• Institutional mapping

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 8

Tools 3 and 4:Trees

Cognitive map to show inputs and outputs

• Financial Management Challenge Action Tree

• Financial flow tree

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 9

Tool 5: Financial Planning multilane highway

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 10

Tool 6: Financial sustainability win-win diamond

Win-winMen/women clients

Bankers

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 11

FALS Stages

• Stage 1: Preliminary market research and development of champions

• Stage 2: Establishing the Financial Action Learning System

• Stage 3: Sustainability and upscaling

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 12

Peer training and upscaling

• Aim for sustainability after 2 years

• Integration of FALS into other activities

• Voluntary peer training within social networks for exponential upscaling (including children)

• Certification of core of proven community trainers for new areas paid by organisation/groups

• Relational marketing for organisational expansion

• Enables more focused response and role for FSP staff and ‘smart subsidies’

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 13

GALS information system

Individual client diaries

Group level recording Integration into SPM

Community level Organisational level

Internal assessment and personal

transformation of staff

To donors

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 14

From micro- to macro-

• Gender Protocol for financial services

• Skills and structures for a social movement for wealth creation and empowerment

• Community-led action research for value chain development and advocacy

• Linkages with banks and government for integration in decision-making, education and training of staff

Empowering women through microfinance: PPT 2 Designing products and services for empowerment © Linda Mayoux 2011 Slide 15

Resources

QUESTIONS?

Rural Finance (search on gender) www.ruralfinance.org

Genfinance website: www.genfinance.info

Oxfam Novib’s WEMAN website www.wemanglobal.org

Microfinance Gateway www.microfinancegateway.org/