financial health
Simplifying Business Lessons to Help Microentrepreneurs Flourish
The Problem
Around the world, 400 million micro, small, and medium enterprises create jobs, bring goods and services to their communities, and drive economic growth. When they succeed, millions of families rise with them.
Most microentrepreneurs never receive formal training in running a business. To close that gap, an industry has cropped up over the past few decades, drawing billions of dollars in investment, to teach them the skills they need to succeed. Yet these courses don’t lead to clear and consistent improvements in entrepreneurs’ business skills. We set out to understand why these trainings fail, and to build something that actually works.
Our Solution
We developed the Financial Heuristics Training, a mobile-based training program that distills financial-management principles into simple, easy to adopt rules of thumb (or heuristics) and delivers them via a recorded phone message at the client’s convenience. Simple guidance like this is easier for people to learn and recall than more complex financial concepts.
The Results
We’ve tested versions of this training with 13,000 microentrepreneurs across four countries: the Dominican Republic, India, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, and have seen strong participation, meaningful shifts in business practices, and in some cases, increased business profitability.
