Girls First Finance

After helping revitalize New Haven on behalf of Yale University, I founded The Christie Company (TCC): a mixed-used education-focused urban development company.  I then founded Africa Integras (AI), a trailblazing early-risk education infrastructure investor in Africa. TCC has advised on or led the development of complex projects in the US, the Caribbean, the UK and Africa. AI has closed a pipeline and commenced work on over $100 million in development through our proprietary public-private partnership structure. In my latest venture, I’ve founded Girls First Finance, a fintech student loan financing venture launching in 2020. I am a graduate of Yale University (BA, History) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil, Land Economy), which I attended as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. I am a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and serve on several not-for-profit boards. I am also an internationally-recognized recording artist, composer and producer and founder of Compositions for a Cause.

“Sugar daddy” education financing is a global crisis; in Africa, up to 50% of girls are forced into sexually exploitative arrangements to pay for schooling. Girls First Finance (“GFF”), a web-based platform and mobile application, provides an alternative by offering affordable student loans and personal and professional development tools to vulnerable girls.

Developed with a $1 million seed investment from The Christie Company, the app will be available globally immediately, providing 360-support to users, particularly survivors of sexual exploitation.  The pilot pool of loans will launch in Kenya in 2021, but GFF is poised to scale financing as needed to meet demand worldwide

GFF’s interactive platform will positively impact millions of at-risk girls by reducing their exposure to sexual exploitation and supporting their education. Moreover, the app will harvest anonymized data to highlight the magnitude of sexual violence and trauma experienced by young women and its impact on society.

Macroeconomic discourse suggests that the best return on investment for emerging economies is widespread girls’ education access. Girls, however, have poorer access to education at all levels. The problem worsens with age: across Africa, approximately 50% of university-age girls are exploited by “sponsors,” older men paying school fees for younger women in exchange for sexual relations. 33% of these women ultimately drop out pregnant or HIV-positive. The majority develop trauma injuries that impair their productivity for life.  Sexual exploitation is rampant among students: according to young women surveyed by GFF, 90% have been pressured by a university lecturer for “sex-for grades”. 

This issue is not exclusive to Africa: 2.5 million students in the United States use Seeking Arrangements, an online platform pairing “sugar babies” with “sugar daddies”. The core problem is a lack of education financing as well as mentorship. Lenders also believe women without credit history or parental income are high-risk borrowers. Yet data from the Kenyan Higher Education Loans Board shows that between 1976- 2012, the default rate for women was 25%, compared to 75% for men. Similarly, studies in the United States show that women are responsible for just 4 out of every 10 consumer debt defaults.

Girls First Finance (“GFF”) has created a mobile app to underwrite and administer student loans to vulnerable young women and provide them with empowerment tools to enhance their academic and career success. GFF is free with premium features offered for a nominal monthly subscription fee. Proceeds from subscriptions are re-invested to hire borrowers unable to secure jobs post-graduation who then help maintain GFF’s dynamic community of women supporting young women. The app is designed to deliver significant value to young women regardless of whether they seek education financing. It will launch globally in 2020 with all services available for free in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Student loans will launch in early 2021 in Kenya with expanded access to follow in Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa as well as, eventually, select cities in the US.

The app support services are an integral part of the GFF loan application and verification process including: mentor-matching, online therapy, job postings, resume building, a panic button, a confidential database to record sexual assaults and a monthly budget tool. These services build trust among app users and mitigate behavioral tendencies that could lead to borrower financial defaults.

The exploitation of young women seeking further education is a global crisis and the implicit acceptance of these practices affects every community. GFF is targeting Africa first because its lack of financing for higher education is the most acute. GFF was created at the request of female faculty in Kenya but it has evolved based on feedback provided by young women through focus groups and surveys administered by GFF over the last 18 months in Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and New York City. This feedback has fundamentally changed aspects of the app design and services offered.  For example, in one focus group, 90% of women attending labeled themselves as survivors of sexual assault. When that statistic was echoed in another focus group, we then prioritized the need to include more trauma therapy support as well as a means to record their traumatic experiences confidentially. We are also relying upon data on young women’s behavior and challenges collected regularly by our partners, including Safaricom, the African Alliance of YMCAs, the Kenyan Higher Education Loans Board, CAMFED, and the Brookings Institution. These organizations will test the finished app with their stakeholders, a process that will continue long after the app is launched formally.  

The opportunity GFF creates to make education accessible to vulnerable girls at scale fits squarely into all three dimensions of the Elevate Prize. The app and the rich macro data it will generate will be transformative in raising awareness about the often-unspoken pandemic crisis the current “sponsor” culture in Africa has created to harm young ambitious women.  And, by creating a platform where women (and ally men) can support younger women and girls in various capacities including with trauma therapy, we are creating a tool to challenge the practice of “sponsors” and empower vulnerable girls to resist such pressures.

November 2018, I was invited to a girls education conference at the Brookings Institution. There I met a female professor from Kenyatta University, a large public university for whom we had won a competitive tender to construct 10,000 dormitory beds. I floated a new idea to supplement our infrastructure projects with student loans prioritizing girls. The Kenyan professor implored me saying the “sponsors” situation in Kenya affected 50% of girls, forcing them to have sex with married men to pay their education expenses.

The next day I met the Ghanaian Ambassador to the US and asked him about “sponsors”. He had investigated the issue at the University of Ghana himself and felt 50% was an accurate estimate of girls forced into exploitative circumstances (a number later confirmed with research). I myself experienced traumatic pressure there during a change of leadership when the new Vice Chancellor didn’t believe I could close our $64 million investment in UG without using my “womanly wiles” to secure it.

I then met with the US Government Development Finance Corporation, which had committed financing to both projects. I shared what I’d learned and asked them also to finance these student loans. They committed then and there.

I once was that vulnerable girl GFF will serve. I needed scholarships to attend Yale and Cambridge University. And I suffered terribly when a professor touched me inappropriately then offered a substandard grade unless I met him alone in his office. I chose my dignity over that bad grade despite needing to do well to land further scholarships.

Post college, I was sexually assaulted repeatedly by investors, government officials and even mentors. I feared being told that I “couldn’t handle” the pressure so I remained silent believing my reputation would be tarnished for “speaking up”. Government officials whose advances I spurned later defamed me publicly calling me a “wicked woman” to prevent me from advancing infrastructure projects directly benefiting hundreds of thousands of poor students. I was eventually diagnosed with complex PTSD needing multi-pronged therapy to address my acute symptoms. One doctor described my brain scan as that of a combat veteran. Except my combat moments were work-related obstacles—similar to the landmines all young women face, especially in Africa, when striving to attain academic and professional goals. Deploying this app makes me feel my arduous journey was preparation to understand and address the daily dangers millions of young women face.

I am a survivor of sexual exploitation and assault myself. I was eventually forced to tell my story publicly, which has helped me gain the trust of the young women GFF will serve.  GFF does not deliver its services out of pity or judgment. I submit it to young women for their scrutiny with the humility of someone who has walked in their shoes and understands first-hand the dangers they face.

I also have experience delivering complex projects that involve many stakeholders coordinating enmeshed issues. In my work revitalizing New Haven, I built consensus between several parties with disparate interests, helping to revitalize the city. With GFF, I am deploying those same skills.

Finally, after 15 years of working in Africa, I understand the cultural nuances required to ensure relationships of mutual respect, and I have built a network that will bring unique visibility to GFF, particularly when validated by an Elevate Prize. I collaborate with top celebrities globally, as well as senior officials across multiple governments who are keen to play an active role in the rollout of GFF. In addition, I’ve already partnered with leading NGOs and corporations to ensure our work is held accountable to best practices.

Historically, a need for capital early in new ventures has sometimes forced me to defer to less knowledgeable investors at a great cost to the economics or the social impact of a project. The Elevate Prize would allow me to avoid such dilution, keeping GFF’s purpose focused and intent pure.

ABSA Bank had a university scholarship scheme in Kenya it was winding down. We proposed converting ABSA’s scholarships into partial loan guarantees multiplying the impact 5X. ABSA declined perceiving our target borrowers too “unbankable” and fearing financial loss. We showed data from private lenders with default rates for girls under 5%, but their biases against female borrowers overcame the strength of our data. We argued our mobile app support with behavioral and emotional empowerment tools would reduce defaults further. They still saw the guarantee as unacceptably risky.

But ABSA knew customer acquisitions are competitive and the younger you secure them the more “sticky” customers are. So we built a financial model with the bank’s collaboration proving that each non-defaulting female borrower (at least 80% based on Kenyan Government data) will bring an NPV of over $20k in revenue and fees from their future income and savings—a value 20X of their potential guarantee on a fraction of borrowers. ABSA concluded it would earn more than $100 million from income generated from the new customers our pilot pool of borrowers represents over the next 40 years. Their credit-enhancing guarantee also allows us to raise significantly more capital after the pilot phase.

Last year, the BBC broke a story about the prevalence of “sex for grades” at the University of Ghana where we have a project. The University’s Vice Chancellor immediately renounced the accusations, choosing to defend the disgraced professor over the brave whistleblower students. I knew these young women would be bullied and not believed. I had a platform and some credibility as an older professional. Having myself been harassed by the same VC, I felt a moral obligation to speak up and support the victims. I told my story on social media, and in doing so, redirected the VC’s ire against the student victims towards me instead. The result was two weeks of headlines in Ghanaian media, with the VC doubling down on his accusations against me. It was intense, triggering, and lonely. But for all the bullying and negative media, there were twice as many messages or more from victims and survivors thanking me for speaking up. Also, the UK government took notice and asked me to help draft a new Code of Conduct to fight sexual violence on college campuses at their donor country institutions. I now have a seat at the table where real change will occur.

NGOs and bilateral donors focused on girls’ education access in Africa use a donor-scholarship model or zero interest loans that are highly impactful but accessible only to a small fraction of the millions of vulnerable young women in need. To reach more women, Girls First Finance pioneered a commercially sustainable, scalable solution. The app is financially sustained with a dual subscription plan: standard, free for all; premium services $3 per month. Concessionary financing from the US Government’s Development Finance Corporation allows single-digit interest rates and longer tenors. Furthermore, third-party bank guarantees for the first tranche of defaults provide a material credit enhancement, making the loan investments attractive for impact and commercial investors alike. And these bank guarantees were secured not through CSR programs but by demonstrating the economic power vulnerable girls represent to banks—as potential customers they would otherwise not be able to access. 

GFF leverages mobile app technology to replace traditional credit underwriting. Most student loans rely upon parental credit and income, eliminating economically vulnerable girls. The GFF app allows underwriters to observe how potential borrowers engage with the app as a proxy for their likely borrowing behavior. 

Finally, GFF addresses the trauma and mental health issues that negatively impact performance and contribute to borrower defaults with services targeting community-based healing, building a close-knit “crew” for each borrower that ensures her journey is visible and constructive.  This “community guarantee” is another non-financial credit enhancement reducing defaults. 

The lack of student loan financing accessible to young women in Africa has become a crisis. Yet the concern over whether young female borrowers are creditworthy is unfounded but still assumed, to the detriment of these young women’s futures. GFF is making a bold commitment to this population, going against the prevailing wisdom that “no credit” means “bad credit”. GFF will dispel this myth by gathering rich data on user behavior through its mobile app, not just as borrowers but as young women building their academic and professional careers. Otherwise, this prevailing wisdom is biased to exclude women from an early age from competing fairly in the global economy.

New data from banks, government and private student lenders, and precedents in women micro-finance lending show strongly how women take borrowing responsibilities more seriously than men and how commercially attractive women customers can be for banks who bet on their success. Yet banks still discriminate against them leading to an alarming reality that among those women lucky enough to obtain tertiary education financing, approximately 50% are forced into sexually exploitative arrangements with older men to do so. This crisis renders tens of millions of women (or more) around the world traumatized and unable to perform at their best. It is also morally reprehensible and must be eliminated at scale if societies are to pledge sincerely to protect and support women and girls.

Eventually, once GFF establishes a track record of success, it will prove the credit-worthiness and commercial value of this target population to the banking industry and commercial sector, which will lead conventional lenders to commence lending to the millions of young women worthy of such financial access.  GFF will also demonstrate that sexual violence impacts individual performance and therefore collective productivity and must be healed.  When it is, all of society's stakeholders benefit financially.  Whether as borrowers or simply as users of the GFF app, millions of young women users will obtain meaningful support by joining the GFF community. 

While Girls First Finance (“GFF”) currently serves no one as it is in the pre-launch phase, we intend to launch the app in the coming months with the loans to follow in early 2021.

GFF serves two main stakeholder groups: mobile app users and borrowers, the latter being a subset of the former, which can encompass vulnerable women around the world.  When the app launches, it has the potential to reach over 500,000 users in year one by nature of the partnerships we have secured to promote it globally. The loans are focused initially on borrowers in Kenya.  Below is a table that illustrates conservative estimates for the number of borrowers GFF expects to finance during its pilot and ramp up phase. Thereafter, the estimates for borrowers grow exponentially assuming a positive track-record of low defaults is established.

Number of New Borrowers

2021: 4,000

2022: 2,000

2023: 4,000

2024: 4,000

2025: 6,000

Total new borrowers in first five years: 20,000

GFF has mapped out the following impact goals for the first five years  of operations. Thereafter, the marketing plan provided shows how we intend to promote the app and work with our partners to reach the user counts necessary to create the vibrant community of support for this vulnerable population of young women. 

Action Targeted and Goal

Target Users in 2021:  500,000

Trained Wellness Warriors in 2021: 1,000

Jobs Placed For Users in 2022: 5,000

Funds sent via “Claim Your Crew” by 2023: 2,000,000

Mentors Connected by 2024: 100,000

Therapy Sessions Provided to Users by 2025: 1,000,000

New Borrowers Served by 2026: 20,000

The barriers that may limit GFF's impact are as follows:

Financial Barriers
1. GFF borrowers are unable to pay back their student loans.
2. GFF borrowers are unwilling to pay back their student loans. 
3. Foreign currency depreciation as loans are provided in US dollars and repaid in local currency. 

Technical Barriers
1. Delay in development of the GFF app prevents disbursement of loans to borrowers.

Operational Barriers
1. Loans are granted to unqualified candidates due to a lack of credit data on target borrower population.
2. Political instability, wars or pandemics lead to a shutdown of universities and prevent repatriation of funds. 

Cultural Barriers
1. There is lack of adequate empirical data on private student loan borrowers from Africa.

GFF will use the following mitigation strategies to overcome the previously highlighted barriers: 

Financial Barriers Mitigation Strategy 
1. GFF will offer a database of job opportunities to help borrowers get jobs. 
2. GFF will report both positive and negative credit history to credit bureaus and mobile lenders, incentivizing them to pay on time.
3. Local bank will provide a foreign exchange hedge.

Technical Barriers Mitigation Strategy 
1. The disbursement of the loan will only happen after the launch of the app.

Operational Barriers Mitigation Strategy 
1. Borrowers will pass strict behavioral and academic criteria for loan approval. In addition, GFF will also rely on recommendations of NGO partners on creditworthy borrowers.
2. Political risk insurance will be taken out to protect investors during force majeure crises.

Cultural Barriers Mitigation Strategy 
1. GFF will rely on borrower data from public and private financiers to show that women present a lower lending risk than men.
2. GFF will utilize the app to generate rich macro data on borrower behavior of target demographic.

1. US Development Finance Corporation (financing)

2. African Alliance of YMCAs (youth training, mental health support, recruitment of internship providers in Kenya)

3. Campaign for Female Education  (recruitment of users and mentors)

4. Global Citizens (content partner for "daily dose" service and recruitment of influencers and corporate sponsors)

5. Safaricom (telecom and cash transfer partner in Kenya via MPESA)

6. Vodafone (telecom and cash transfer partner in Ghana via Mobile Wallet)

7. Business and Financial Times (recruitment of mentors and internship partners in Ghana)

8. ABSA Bank (first lost guarantee provider) 

9. LEAP Kenya (borrower data verification and loan administration support)

10. Oasis Africa (trauma therapy and training of additional trauma counselors in Kenya0

11. Kenya Higher Education Loans Board (recruitment of borrowers)

The GFF app and underwriting process allow borrowers to apply for student loans at more competitive terms and with great accessibility than existing banks. GFF will assess applicants’ general app usage as well as require a psychometric test as a proxy to augment traditional credit underwriting criteria. GFF will also employ specific behavioral assessments and empowerment tools through its services including:  

1.      Claim Your Crew: Borrowers must recruit a “crew” of four people, (2 peers, 2 mentors) from the app. The “crew” and borrower agree to share and monitor the borrower’s budget and loan information. Crews are notified of late payments or defaults as well as where a borrower’s potential shortfall leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. The app automatically requests financial support from “crew” members for users via Paypal or M-Pesa.

2.      Meet Your Mentor: Borrowers must use our searchable database to identify and secure a mentor from anywhere in the world.

3.      Finance Your Future: A financial budgeting feature for users to track monthly expenses in order to foster financial literacy, which is a requirement for borrowers to maintain for at least six months prior to submitting an application.

4.      Rock Your Resume: Access to resume support and a job application portal for internship and full-time opportunities.

5.      Wellness Warriors: A database of wellness experts and therapists at discounted prices.

6.      Sticky Situations: A panic button to contact friends and family in uncomfortable or emergency situations.

7.      Artemis: A tool to confidentially report sexual exploitation and assault.

Since 2018, the Christie Company has invested approximately $1 million as seed funding to develop the app and the network of partnerships required to deliver the loans most financially sustainably.  This funding is considered and early-risk equity investment. 

GFF anticipates the following expenses during the first twelve months: 

App Services Costs: $400,000

App Development and Maintenance: $100,000

Marketing, Legal and Operational Expenses: $250,000

Payroll and Other Expenses: $250,000

Historically, a need for capital early in new ventures has sometimes forced me to defer to less knowledgeable investors to meet their desire for control at a great cost to the economics or the social impact of a project. In at least one case, their prioritization of profits over social impact had a catastrophic impact on the project. 

Particularly a venture that involves the safekeeping of sexually exploited young women requires strict prioritization of the social impact goals during the final stages of conceptualization and launch. Equally, we have conceived of GFF to be commercially sustainable so it can be scalable eventually. The Elevate Prize would allow me to avoid such dilution during this early incubation and launch phase, keeping GFF’s purpose focused and intent pure to ensure we solve the social crisis we are targeting.  It will also bring incredible validation for a new model of financing this population, which will support our general fundraising efforts substantially. 

We have listed our current partners previously.  Further desired partners will come as we roll-out the launch.