Donor money has gone to developing economies for decades, yet many of the target problems persist. This money is often specified for particular uses, and usually those uses are not what the recipient’s community needs. Resultantly, money is wasted and communities aren’t helped.

After seeing this breakdown firsthand in a number of countries, we created SavingsMatch.org to change this process for the better.

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The challenge

Getting donors and moving money across borders is not easy. More challenging than that is using money to create an effective, honest and moral economic incentive program.

Even harder still is doing what has traditionally been a government’s job, as a non-profit that hopes to turn for-profit.

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My approach

I joined forces with a talented team of people from Kiva, Hult International School of Business, and Oracle to design a donor based economic incentive program from the ground up.

We took the best attributes from what we had seen in practice. While it’s challenging to sustain, we knew there was a supply of donor money from the west. We knew from decades of non-profits that telling people how to spend it didn’t work, so that was out. Instead we decided just to give it directly (credit to GiveDirectly for the phrase). But, we had seen the success of government programs like the US’s Earned Income Tax Credit that provided an incentive for earning more money. So, we structured an incentive into our idea.

And finally, we had a key insight.

In many low income communities the team had seen, when one community member would have extra money, they’d give it away. Kind, but it’s no way to build wealth. So we decided to create an incentivized savings program.

I handled the crowdfunding website, ‘hiring’ (no-pay) two talented developers off of a Craigslist post. We used a Wordpress theme with a little custom work to be efficient as possible.

I managed the web team, and led weekly meetings with the whole team, reporting back our progress and helping drive the rest of the program.

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The impact

We ran a pilot round in Pune, India, where the team had connections, and found about 80% of participants met their savings goals and received matches. We successfully crowdfunded for those savers.

In post savings interviews we learned that most of the savers had never saved nearly that amount before. Money was saved for expanding businesses, education, health expenses and more.

We believe there is promise this idea. However, handling the money manually is not scalable. After our pilot in Pune, India, we connected with the team’s contacts in Nairobi, Kenya to explore automating the program via Kenya’s M-PESA mobile money system.

Ultimately, we lacked the resources to run a team in Kenya. Revenue models from donations are not impossible, but are challenging.

*the website is not currently maintained, and is displaying wrong data on campaigns