In an Amplio webinar on April 7, Strategic Impact Advisors shared their strategies and open-source audio content for their Hey, Sister! Show Me the Mobile Money! Campaign
Women’s barriers to mobile money include a lack of education, training, and a support network. To address this, Strategic Impact Advisors (SIA) developed Hey, Sister! Show Me the Mobile Money!, a digital financial literacy campaign that uses audio content.
Funded by USAID, the campaign is open-source and available in multiple languages.
“We know from research done by MIT and Georgetown that access to mobile money can move women out of poverty,” said Shelley Spencer, SIA's founder and CEO. “But literacy is the top barrier to women’s use of mobile internet service in low- and middle-income countries. So we looked at how we could bring digital and financial literacy together.”
Watch a recording of our partner webinar: Hey, Sister! Designing Audio Content (April 7, 2021)
In creating the Hey, Sister! content, SIA recognized that women have different needs, with different levels of digital and financial literacy. They wanted to offer short, bite-sized learning for better retention and harness the power of storytelling. When the pandemic struck, SIA chose to go with IVR (interactive voice response), which uses audio content.
Hey, Sister! includes 25 short audio lessons. The lessons follow three women as they help, teach, and support one another to use mobile money to manage their finances safely. The women are based on archetypes developed by IDEO.org. There’s also a facilitator’s guide to train the trainers.
The audio files are available to download for free, in the following languages: English, French, Ga, Twi, Dagbani, Hausa, Ewe, Kassem, Runyakitara, Ateso, Luganda, Lugbara, Luo, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda, and Swahili. No access to audio? No problem! You can download the scripts in English or French to translate to other languages.
“The target audience is women, but the audio content is available for anyone to use. For SIA, the targeting is done through local facilitators, not just a digital delivery channel,” Spencer explained.
“SIA has country leads in Ghana, Uganda, and Malawi who recruit organizations that are working directly with women. Facilitation is key. That’s where you can take this content and put it on any platform you want — including Talking Books. That’s typically what the facilitators are doing. They’re downloading the content and taking it to play within a group setting.”
For more information about partnering with the Hey, Sister! Show Me the Mobile Money! project, contact Sarah Sitts at ssitts@siaedge.com.