Are the ventures you’re investing in committed to gender equality?
Dispatches from East Africa, financial confidence insights, and a guide to understanding venture intent, capability, and commitment
How is it already the end of November? As the year winds down, we have a few big updates—the first being our time spent earlier this month in East Africa.
In November, the LMM team traveled to Kenya and Uganda to meet our partners and host several events there. In Nairobi on November 3rd, we talked about the Financial Confidence Playbook toolkit and resources like our Agent Learning Platform. The following week in Kampala, we hosted a futuring workshop, “Money Reimagined,” convening a global group of thought leaders, providers, and team members from the Gates Foundation to explore the future of cash, access, and distribution for the last mile. While we plan to share more about this work soon, here are some of our favorite moments from the trip!
From top to bottom: the Financial Confidence Playbook Happy Hour in Nairobi, the “Money Reimagined” futuring workshop, and a Happy Hour with local partners in Kampala. Credits: John Won, Busby Allan
Introducing the Gender Evaluation Framework: A Rubric to Understand Venture Intent, Capability, and Commitment
This year, as part of the Last Mile Money Accelerator, we incorporated an active and intentional gender lens into our venture evaluation process. In partnership with Mansi Gupta, founder of Unconform and thought leader currently building Women-Centric Design, we co-created a Gender Evaluation Framework.
We used the framework to ensure that the ventures we chose to support are actively committed to driving real change for women at the last mile. We are now sharing this framework broadly, with the hope to inspire a new dimension in how evaluation happens across venture funding and acceleration—ultimately helping to increase financial prosperity for the world’s most vulnerable.
📚 What we’re watching this month
LMM’s Kanika Kumar and Anukriti Kedia were featured in a recent D91 Labs podcast episode “Designing digital financial products for last-mile users,” which shares the story of why we built the Financial Confidence Playbook and discusses some of our top takeaways from building inclusive financial products. Listen in to learn some new insights!
📈 Launch and scale with us
If you’re interested in scaling last-mile solutions and helping financial agents grow, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with our team at LastMileMoney@ideo.com