What is hiding behind such a savant word?

Driving new behaviors into designing products or solutions starting with the consumer in mind. I was fortunate enough to have experienced the human-centered design (HCD) approach from start to end with Innate Motion, PHB Development and the national Treasury of Senegal. So what was the issue we wanted to solve?

About 30.000 retired civil servants collect their pension in cash every month at the Treasury agencies in Senegal. Typically, this means for five days towards the end of the month, long lines for thousands of pensioners coming from all areas to make it to the payment centers distant by all means (walk, taxi, bus) to collect their pensions. Are there other ways for these people to receive their pension payments? Certainly, but this is not the right question. The right question is whether the retired civil servants would like to be paid differently for their pension.

In an effort to provide an HCD response to the question, Innate Motion and PHB Development organised immersion sessions in the home of select retired pensioners for MM4P and Treasury teams. The objective of the immersions sessions was to better understand the pensioners' lives and the current pensions payments process - walk a mile in my shoes and you will understand a glimpse of my reality!

The key insights that came out of the immersion process were the desire and need of the pensioners for recognition and dignity throughout the transition from being active contributors to the society to being in a position of dependency with retirement.

The second step in the process was co-creation: bringing select pensioners to focus group discussions with MM4P and the Treasury to create with them the payment process that would work for them. This new step led to one of the biggest learning from the HCD approach: the power of smart segmenting.

In the pensions project, the team came up with four different profiles of pensioners and looked at the different payment options and the capacity and appetite of each type of pensioners against the proposed medium. This exercise was very useful to understand: (1) that not all pensioners are the same, (2) which group would most likely consist of first adopters and (3) the importance of smart communication/campaigns and training of pensioners during the pilot phase to improve adoption of the different payments mechanism that will be offered. So are the pensioners for the digitisation of the pension payments? Yes. Is it true for all pensionners? No, not for everybody.

The digitisation options range from receiving payments over-the-counter through agent network to getting them directly in their own mobile wallet or a card. However, there will still be a subset that will prefer to go to the Treasury to receive their payments. And that is OK.

We are currently at the stage of planning a pilot for the different payment options. The strategy being to invest up-front in communication and training of the different payment options, and offer pensioners the opportunity to opt in for their selected payment mechanism.

Working with the first adopters and ensuring their transition to the new payment options should be smooth, and it should facilitate them becoming the ambassadors of change within the retired civil servant community in Senegal.

How will this participatory approach impact the ecosystem of digital finance? To be continued...

For more information, please contact:

Sabine Mensah
Regional Technical Specialist Digital Finance
mm4p.senegal@uncdf.org
https://mm4p.uncdf.org