SYPO has operational costs less than half that of our peers in East
Africa
We use a flat organization with minimal management
Use of mobile technology allows us to help women in remote areas
Financial services are a crucial tool in the fight against poverty. The good news is
that in
Africa, banks and microfinance organizations have grown significantly over the past decade, reaching more
and more
people. The bad news is that this growth is mainly confined to urban areas.

Centenary Bank branch in urban Uganda
Offering and collecting small loans in remote rural areas can be expensive. In
an urban
area, high population density means that borrowers can walk to a branch to repay. They have ID cards, which
makes it
easier to get a credit history from them, and many of them have bank accounts, allowing for wire transfer
repayments. Most importantly: they have larger financing needs. It is simply cheaper to collect
repayments on
one $100,000 loan than it is on a thousand $100 loans.
The women in our project are typically unregistered (do not have ID cards), do
not have
bank accounts, take out loans as small as $100, and live in over 30 villages, spread across a large
region.
They cannot all travel to the same place once a week for their repayments. That means that we have to go to
them,
for repayments as small as $2 a week. For most financial institutions, this is prohibitively expensive.
SYPO's
mission to reach women who previously did not have access to formal financial services meant that we had to
find a
way to work with very low operating costs.
Since the start, SYPO has achieved operating costs over 50% lower than those of peer
organizations in East Africa (see figure). We are able to provide microcredits to women in remote areas of
Uganda,
and still cover all the costs with interest paid on the microcredits - interest that
is significantly
lower than that of other organizations. This operational self-sufficiency is important: it ensures our long
term
viability, and also avoids unfair competition with other financial institutions.
The core of the model is that each of our loan officers (called Zone Managers in our
organization) have end-to-end responsibility over their own 'zone': a village with a simple field
office,
and several nearby repayment centers. A Zone Manager trains her own new clients, processes
applications,
disburses microcredits, collects repayments, manages her licenses, helps with recruitment and does the
(financial) reporting for the zone. This serves multiple purposes. It's more efficient, because it
takes out
layers of management and does not duplicate work (such as tellers and loan officers in peer organizations).
It is
motivating for the Zone Manager, because each of our team members can feel responsible and proud for her
part of the
company that she built herself. And it avoids fraud in the organization, because end-to-end accountability
takes
away the risk of finger pointing. To make this possible, we hire great talent (see an overview of
our full team here), invest in education, and use online systems to ensure that there is a (in
many
cases automated) four eye principle in place for all transactions. Internal and external audits form an
additional saveguard against fraud.

SYPO mobile center where women come to repay their microcredits
The other way in which we keep costs low is through the use of (mobile) technology.
Many of
the women make repayments using 'mobile money', allowing them to not travel to the repayment centers every
week. We
use automated text messaging to keep women informed of their repayment status, and simple behavioral
economics to
encourage better repayment behavior. SYPO is experimenting with 'psychometric credit
scoring': short questionnaires designed to predict someone's risk of default. All transactions in
the
project are processed through cloud-based platforms, which makes reporting simpler and can quickly identify
any
problems emerging in the portfolio.
We are starting to experiment with text messaging that can help the women with their
businesses, such as weather forecasts, commodity price information, tips about irrigation or fertilizers,
etc.
Another pilot we're rolling out is text messaging with health information, primarily aimed at risks around
pregnancy
and prevention of diabetes - a growing problem in sub-Saharan Africa.
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