Kick off Female Entrepreneurship in Indonesia
Indonesia is the 4th largest population in the world, and also one of the poorest. In this country of 252 million people, half of all households are clustered around the national poverty line of US$24.40 / month. 9 million of those households are also headed by single women.
Wobe Wonder Women aims to give them a fighting chance at earning income, accessing financial services and improving financial literacy.
With Wobe, our women agents can:
- Earn $5/day by selling phone airtime, internet packages and other prepaid products
- Function as the 'human ATM or convenience store' for virtual prepaid products in their community
- Learn tips on financial literacy
Single women who lead households solely are among the most vulnerable of the poor. We target to train 1000 women in such situations and provide them with the tools they need to carry out basic micro-entrepreneurship so as to give their families a fighting chance.
* Recently, we won second place in Dusan Stojanovic's female entrepreneurship competition, which was conducted globally. Over 150 female-led startups participated, and we came in second out of 12 finalists, earning a donation of 12 000 USD
This crowdfunding campaign is launched to match this donation so that we can scale up the impact of our work.
We are a Singaporean and Indonesian company.
What We Need
$25 000 helps us carry out training programs, expand to new cities in Indonesia and also provide additional support such as free mobile internet for our women. We work through local women's NGOs so as to identify the women most in need.
- We conduct a workshop, provide training materials, and follow up support
- Most of them don't have smartphones or internet. We source for these through our strategic partners, which are telcos and NGOs and handset manufacturers
$10 000 goes to workshops
$10 000 goes to business credit for women attending our workshops (each $1 in our app credit lets them sell $1 worth of products and services, letting them net around $0.20 profit per sale)
$5000 goes to handset and mobile internet sim card subsidies for the lowest income of our women
The Impact
With 1000 women running a small business from their mobile phones, we expect the following impact.
- 25% of 1000 to be super agents, making around US$10/day on just 3 key products: phone airtime, electricity vouchers
- 50% of 1000 to be median level agents, making around $2-5 / day
- The rest of the agents to be sporadic, or not familiar with technology, using the app only from time to time
We aim to provide at least $200 000 in total additional income to this group of 1000 women.
Background
- What does 'prepaid' mean? In Indonesia, everybody uses what would be known in the US as a 'burner phone'
- Most people have more than one mobile number. It's the ultimate life hack: one sim card for cheap data, another for SMS, another for voice calls
- Electricity and water also operates on the same principle as a 'burner'. It's all prepaid. Example: you buy $10 worth of electricity for your generator. You key in the account number. With $1 left in the generator, the generator starts beeping and you have to go to 7-Eleven to get a reload
- Or you are talking to your girlfriend who maybe lives in another city, and your prepaid burner phone runs out of credit. You would also have to go to a 7-Eleven to get a reload
- Or you could walk to your neighbour's house! If she's a Wobe Wonder Woman, she can send you a reload over-the-air, and you hand her cash
- Our Wonder Woman makes a little off each transaction. With 10-20 transactions per day she could make $5 daily, which would nudge her family away from the poverty line and towards 'minimum wage'
- (In the future we will be introducing additional services for them to earn more and learn more)
Risks & Challenges
Travel costs. Indonesia is a huge country.
- We would need to assume that we get venue rentals at free or very low costs, because of what we do. We try to work with village leaders to get access to village / town halls
- Our impact could be minimal depending on how much we raise. Our impact is limited to key islands like Java and Sumatra. Anything else would cost thousands of dollars in travel costs.
- We focus on the key cities and townships of Java and Sumatra for now to gauge further impact
Other Ways You Can Help
Tell people about this campaign!
- If you work with women's issues in SE Asia, we would love to talk to you
- If you have other ideas on how you can help, we would love to hear from you
