Unilever Digitising Shakti

Driving last-mile digital payments for Hindustan Unilever’s Shakti Entrepreneurs in India

Creating a digital behavioural change campaign to encourage adoption of digital payment.

Partners

Hindustan Unilever
Better Than Cash Alliance
Re-Emerging World

Expertise

Marketing and distribution
Business model innovation

Sectors

Finance
Food and agriculture
Water, sanitation & hygiene

Markets

India

Timeline

2019 to 2021

Opportunities in digital payments

Everyday billions of cash is transacted physically in low-income markets. These cash payments are associated with lack of transparency, accountability and security. In addition people who carry out these transactions are part of the approximately two billion people who have no access to the formal financial sector.

Adopting digital payments has the potential of aiding billions accessing the financial sector and thus exploit a variety of appropriate and affordable financial services to help them save safely, take advantage of economic opportunities and reduce their vulnerability to risk. This would greatly improve the lives of low-income people, especially women, while giving governments, the development community and the private sector a more transparent, time and cost efficient, and often safer means of making and receiving payments.

Quoted from BTCA website
Impact

Increased efficiency and reduced risk for last-mile entrepreneurs

Supported Unilever

In developing onboarding tools and strategy

10,000 agents trained

And capable of making digital payments

Talk to us

Curious about this project?

Nick, our Marketing and Distribution Lead is happy to tell you more about it.

Nick van der Velde
Timeline

Project milestones

Discover

Insights research on needs of Shakti entrepreneurs

Define

Define: Pilot and design of onboarding training

Develop

Develop: Finalise design & onboarding material

Deliver

Deliver: Roll-out to 10,000 entrepreneurs

Downloads

Resources

Responsible Digitization of Small Entrepreneurs in Rural India

Lessons from digitizing the Hindustan Unilever Shakti channel