The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contracted EnCompass to conduct a landscape analysis of technologies, actors, innovations, and trends in technology-enabled self help groups.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation approved its first strategy on gender equality in 2017. Among other elements, the strategy includes a major focus on self-help groups (SHGs) as a tool for fostering women’s economic empowerment. Due to the growth of mobile and digital technologies in Africa and India, the Foundation is interested in the current and potential use of such technologies to support SHGs. They contracted EnCompass to conduct a landscape analysis of technologies, actors, innovations, and trends in technology-enabled SHGs.

The EnCompass team engaged the Foundation’s stakeholders early on to ensure that the landscape analysis would be of use. Next, EnCompass conducted an in-depth document review and a series of interviews to examine the potential of current and future technologies in the context of developing country, or low-resource, settings. EnCompass will facilitate learning events with the Foundation to share a synthesis of the findings, and finalizing a learning agenda that captures results of the process.

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