Financial inclusion is crucial for promoting social and economic mobility, particularly for women who have historically faced discrimination and deprivation. Access to affordable financial services covering transactions, savings, credit, and insurance empowers women to control their income, enhance decision-making, and access previously unavailable economic opportunities. In the last decade, leveraging technology fintech startups in India have started to offer innovative financial products and services to address gaps in banking, payments, lending, and insurance. Through digital platforms, mobile applications, and data analytics, they fostered efficiency, accessibility, affordability, transparency and inclusion. However, several existing institutional, regional, and societal barriers still restrict women to adopt these options to improve their social and economic agency. 

In this context, IIMA- Ventures launched the Women’s Financial Inclusion Initiative in 2022 to enhance the usage and diversity of financial products and services, especially among those from marginalized socio-economic backgrounds across various regions in India. The program aims at an enabling environment that promotes innovation in early and mature stage fintechs, utilises data-backed insights, and builds a community of practice that adopts gender neutrality with the goal of enhancing financial inclusion and women’s agency of women within a pre-determined period by 2026.

In Dec 2023, niiti consulting was invited to assess and track the progress of the Initiative by co-creating evaluation design, capturing and reporting periodic data-backed insights with both the fintechs and IIMA Ventures. The process also fosters a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and scale sustainably.

This article narrates the processes followed to develop the evaluation design of the WFII that provides insight to both the fintech and system (meta) levels. 

Capturing the Community Voice

The primary objective of any evaluation design is to build a Theory of Change (ToC) – the roadmap or “cause and effect” blueprint, bringing out the linkages between interventions and desired outcomes, with indicators tracking progress. A participatory engagement in developing ToC helps organizations to brainstorm their goals and strategies during the design stage to consider the multiple ways they could reach their goal and the best mix of activities.

It is critical that the ToC focusses on finding the most pressing needs of the target communities while understanding their socio-cultural contexts. In our experience, many times, asking the right questions helps to prioritise these needs, sharpening the ToC and ensuring the sustainable and long-term changes or impacts. Exploratory visits to different geographies helped us to map and prioritise the needs of women pursuing diverse livelihoods in rural and peri-urban areas, form the foundation of the design process.  

Asking the right questions

Questions are inquiries that guide the process of gathering information, exploring concepts, and providing contextual deep-dive understanding. Questions are designed to stimulate critical thinking, reflection, and learning to guide the evaluation process by the needed correlation between interventions and expected outcomes. A sectoral understanding also helps identify gaps to be answered through the evaluation design. 

For example, one critical learning question we identified was, “How are fintechs determining the needs of their women customers?” Addressing this in the evaluation design can help build the cause-effect linkages between the identified needs and the innovations of fintechs, like flexible repayment plans, lower interest rates, or specialised financial education programs. It also helps us understand the outreach and uptake challenges that fintechs face on the ground.

Another key learning question was “What are the priorities and strategies for fintechs’ organizational growth?” Aligning Fintechs’ ToC with their strategic business priorities is essential for the adoption and integration it into their operations. Once data insights from the evaluation enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their offerings, Fintechs are more likely to adopt evaluation processes into their operations. 

Consultative design thinking

For a measurable improvement of a program needs all stakeholders or partners should have clarity on their role and its purpose in achieving the larger goal of the program. Without this, even strong individual efforts and great implementation on ground may challenge the sustainability of the program’s desired impact. 

A participatory-consultative approach, led by self-reflection and stakeholder engagement, can make any evaluation design more adaptable for all stakeholders. While developing the ToC, we initiated several consultations with the fintechs not only to guide them but to create opportunities for critical reflection. These learning questions helped us to get more clarity on their customer offerings and their business models.

This process helps us to converge the Fintech’s business approach with the program-level goals while enabling them to understand the linkages between the specific activities and short-term goals with their intended long-term impact.

Visualisation of design

The biggest challenge of the development of a complex and layered ToC is in its visual representation. Clear and testable visual representation of a hypothesis about how change will enhance accountability as well as increase the credibility of results, as they align with the predicted outcomes. This can be done in different forms – simple flow diagrams or complex graphics with detailed legends and annotations, they attempt to map out the connections and pathways between an intervention and its outcomes. 

In this case, we developed an evaluation design that practitioners in fintechs, who are less familiar with social impact-oriented ToCs, could adopt and implement effortlessly to work towards the predicted systemic change. 

After considering several options, we selected a structure loosely based on an Outcome Hierarchy method. The visual representation outlines all the necessary outcomes (from short-term to longer-term) to achieve the intervention’s goal. We clubbed these outcomes into four specific impact areas that the Initiative aims to achieve.

The process of constructing a visual ToC illustrates the complexity of the interventions, often challenging stakeholders’ simplistic assumptions about change processes. In this case, the ToC had to highlight the convergence of changes enabled by individual fintechs and IIMA Ventures at an ecosystem level. The broad steps followed in creating a simple visual representation of a sophisticated evaluation design are shown below:

• Articulate the intended transformational change. We articulated the transformational change that the program aims to achieve and arrived at four key areas, namely gender intentionality, innovation in fintech products and services, improved agency of women, and sustainability of fintechs.
• Map long-term impacts. We have defined long-term impacts at the fintech level and an ecosystem level to map the long-term impacts in the key areas of transformation at different levels.
• Link interventions to long-term impacts. This task was onerous and difficult, as it was important to identify interventions amongst the fintechs that were common enough to consolidate data for drawing system-level insights and predict trends while retaining their individual character and specific business outcomes.
• Make it specific and realistic. In the visualisation process, often in the attempt to simplify, critical linkages and steps are hidden or inadequately represented. By iterating the design with stakeholders—specifically IIMA Ventures and fintechs—we were able to gain a deeper understanding of the intervention details. This collaborative process allowed us to create a more nuanced and realistic visual representation.

The real test of this evaluation design is that it remains simple to communicate and use by those fintechs who are onboarded and were part of the design process while being relevant to newer fintechs who are yet to be onboarded into the WFII program. The ease with which we have been able to align the offerings of a couple of new fintechs who were onboarded after the basic evaluation design was done gives us the confidence that the design is robust and inclusive.  We do firmly believe that evaluation designs need to be viewed as a process as opposed to a static diagram, which continuing to evolve during this program to draw the best value from it.

References

1. Srinivasan, Devyani & Vaidyanathan, Meena & Srivastav, Shweta. (2022). Building an Evaluation Culture in Organisations for maximizing Impact. 10.13140/RG.2.2.15545.24163.
2. Balasubramanian, Rajeshwari & Vaidyanathan, Meena. (2023). Special Article Key Pathways to Developing a Participatory Theory of Change for System Change Tracking: A practice-oriented toolkit for enabling an evaluation culture. 2. 85-101.
3. Rogers, P. (n.d.). Outcomes hierarchy. BetterEvaluation. Retrived from https://www.betterevaluation.org/methods-approaches/methods/outcomes-hierarchy

Authored by Meena Vaidyanathan, niiti consulting