Monthly update: November 2020

Para a versão em português, clique aqui.

Dear supporters,

Now in our second month of operations at Crédito Social, we continue meeting our monthly objectives. Over the past 30 days, we succeeded in:

• Establishing a larger social media presence, particularly via entrepreneurship Facebook groups. Over the course of this process, however, we shifted our strategy to focus more on personal interactions. Rather than engage the groups as Crédito Social, we used our personal profiles to respond to users’ questions with content from the company’s page, adding further credibility to company’s online educational materials;
• Initiating more in-depth conversations with microfinance organizations and financial institutions. Through these ongoing conversations, we are gaining greater and greater confirmation that microfinance providers need scalable third-party support solutions for their microloan recipients; and
• Doubling our total clients from month 1. We also had our first client successfully complete one full month of bookkeeping via our smartphone approach, including recording over 500 sales and many other surprising and exciting data.

Recent publications

Last week, the academic journal, Journal of Social Science Education, published my article on financial education technology for microentrepreneurs in Brazil. Find the publication here.

Some of my other recent publications include:

• Brazil’s Complicated Relationship with Money
• Brazil’s Complicated Relationship with Small Business
• A Queda da Maçã: Procurando forças naturais na economia humana

The educational scenario: Encouraging new research

One of Crédito Social’s most fundamental challenges is fostering new habits of financial control among microentrepreneurs. Despite the massive investment and research into financial education and small business training globally, most initiatives have delivered disappointing results so far. Nevertheless, as my article contends, there are clear paths forward to not only improve training and support for microentrepreneurs, but scale such approaches for greater global impact. In another recent article, David McKenzie, Lead Economist at the World Bank, arrives at a very similar conclusion after analyzing over 20 financial and entrepreneurship training program around the world. He, like me, concludes that there do exist effective programs; however, they operate at scales too small to achieve the impact emerging economies need. To reach such a scale, he recommends initiatives focus on:

• Behavior (psychology) of microentrepreneurs;
• One-on-one interactions between microentrepreneur and trainer/teacher; and
• Heuristic, actionable, and culturally appropriate content.

As Crédito Social already focused on these very areas, this was a significant validation of our approach by one of the world’s leading economic development and financial education researchers.

Our next objectives

Our goals for the next 30 days are to:

• Double, again, our number of active clients;
• Develop online dashboards for our clients to be able to see their businesses’ performance in real time on their cell phones and computers; and
• Automate our process of client financial data collection via WhatsApp.

I look forward to sharing more progress with you in a month’s time. In the meantime, please, follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

Until then.

Abraço,
Nathaniel
CEO, Crédito Social

Para a versão em português, clique aqui.

Originally published at https://www.notion.so.