Virtual Marketplace Literacy Project

We have a proven and unique approach. We are at an important inflexion point in our evolution. We have an extended track record over 20 years, reaching more than 100000 women using a variety of ways to support our enterprise. We have the deep preparation and extensive experience to take our education of different types of literacies (consumer, entrepreneur, and sustainability), in different contexts (urban, rural, isolated tribal), for different beneficiaries (adults, youth, children), in different modes (in-person, video, mobile), with different types of partnerships (driven by us, designed by us and delivered by others). 

But to take this next step of scale, and make it happen in the virtual sphere of the Covid-19 and post Covid-19 era, we need a larger injection of support. 

We aim to develop a digital platform development that would integrate and adapt of our proven educational methods and materials into a systematized, user accessed portfolio of learning modules made available across the spectrum of digital delivery methods and devices

The scale of what the Elevate Prize offers will elevate our endeavor.

Reaching a million people will enable beneficiary savings and enterprise
income that will multiply by the hundreds for years to come.

As a long-time business professor, I have been privileged to pioneer the stream of work on subsistence marketplaces. I began this journey as much of humanity lives in the broad range of low income and conducts business. Yet, we do not study them sufficiently in business schools. Moreover, when we do, we view them as new markets. My approach was to study these contexts, inside-out, bottom-up. This has led to unique synergies between research, education for students, and education for communities (i.e., marketplace literacy). 

What is most rewarding is how completely integrated this journey is. What we learnt through research impacted our social enterprise on marketplace literacy. And our bottom-up journey, in turn, enriched our research.

My vision has been for two and a half decades and remains how I can use my good fortune to enable marketplace literacy - at the intersection of my purpose, passion, and proficiency. Along the way, this has meant aspects such as consumer literacy, entrepreneurial literacy, and more recently, sustainability literacy. With the latter, how can we educate people to try to meet the challenges of climate change where they live and work.

A woman living in poverty in rural and urban settings around the world has many challenges to overcome in participating in the marketplace. She needs to overcome restrictions placed by her familys and societal norms. She needs to gain confidence in herself to be able to carry out her role as a customer or as an entrepreneur. She needs the skills and knowledge that will enable her to do so. And she needs to know her rights in the marketplace. To address these challenges, she needs marketplace literacy education and support in a variety of arenas.

Traditional approaches that aim to empower her focus on specific livelihood training and microfinancing or in providing access to value chains and other linkages to employment and entrepreneurship. However, to empower her means to address issues of her self-confidence and core identity at an emotional and motivational level, and her capacities at a cognitive level. It means fully understanding her life circumstances at a minute level and using this understanding to consider solutions.

Our approach focuses on a bottom-up approach to enabling know-why or deeper understanding of the marketplace in addition to know-what (to buy or sell) and know-how.

Traditional interventions focus on two key needs for individuals living with low income to participate in marketplaces as customers or entrepreneurs, namely, financial resources (e.g., microfinancing), and market access.  Marketplace literacy is the third key element. Developed through pioneering research taking a bottom-up orientation, marketplace literacy is unique in using the know-why or an understanding of marketplaces as a basis for the know-how of being an informed buyer or seller.  Despite the difficulties with abstract thinking that low-literate individuals may experience, our program enables a deeper understanding of marketplaces by leveraging the social skills that participants bring to the program and relating educational content back to their lived experiences.  The program is bottom-up, concretizing, localizing, and socializing the education, innovating in the content as well as the delivery, covering concepts using picture sorting, role plays, and so on, that tap into people's lived experiences.

The program develops knowledge and skills, self-confidence, and awareness of rights -  enabling women to be better customers and entrepreneurs. Being a better customer comes with immediate benefits – money saved and better quality purchases. Our program assessment shows a significant proportion of women start a small enterprise or expand an existing one after our program.

After spending about two decades to learn and achieve moderate scale of over 100,000 beneficiaries, we wish to achieve impact in a Post Covid world. This journey has taken us from in-person programs in small scale to video-based programs with facilitators. However, our focus now is to design and demonstrate, serving as a resource for other organizations in both customizing marketplace literacy education to different audiences and through different modes, and in implementing programs.

A digital platform can enable our partners to plug and play and share their learning. It can cater to a variety of different audiences. And it can build on what we do very well - use insights developed from careful research to design education.

We have developed virtual content in the form of image diaries of important marketplace literacy lessons. We envision virtual delivery through a variety of means such as zoom. And we envision virtually connecting people to build on their interactions to enable education.

Our approaches are time tested and based on grounded research. And we continue to have a research mindset in evaluating impact.