Doodle kicked-off the “Financial Futures” project launched by Standard Chartered Bank, Primark and IDEO.org, an initiative to enhance financial health and agency amongst garment workers around Vietnam. 1 member of the Doodle team set off with our design partners, IDEO.org, to 8 different Primark factory locations situated across Vietnam. After successfully interviewing over 60 garment workers, the team obtained a deep understanding of the average worker’s relationship with money, their financial pain points, and the priority areas of opportunities to address during the coming design phase. As the project continues to progress, we are certain these valuable insights will transform into solutions that equip factory workers with the adequate knowledge and capabilities to plan for themselves and their families, using digitized finance.

– Doodle Team

Xin chào from Vietnam! 

In partnership with Standard Chartered Bank and Primark, we’ve spent the last few weeks conducting user research interviews and concept testing in factories throughout Vietnam. After speaking with over 60 garment workers in eight different factories, we now have a better understanding of workers’ relationship with money, their pain points and pressures, and the most urgent opportunities for design. We will work with Doodle Design, our local design partners, to turn the insights we gathered into a financial health solution that equips these workers with the knowledge, access, and agency to utilize digital financial services effectively for themselves and their families.

Early Insights

We have identified strong behavioral patterns amongst factory workers and are eager to develop a powerful narrative that helps bring their stories to life. Here is what has emerged so far in our research:

1. Finance | Communal cash

There are strong generational and familial ties that affect how workers manage their wages, with some giving more than half of their earnings to their parents to manage. The financial responsibility for married couples, especially those with children, also has long term implications and can lead to generations of financial difficulty. This means that the solutions we design will need to take into account the communities in which the workers live.

2. Gender | Who runs the world? 

In general, women are the financial planners and custodians within the families of the workers we interviewed. The men we spoked to shared that they hand over 80% or more of their earnings to their wives so that they can manage family expenses. This means that any solution we put forward should be designed with these social and gender norms in mind.

3. Life Stage | Navigating Nuance

The workers we spoke to were between 18 and 45 years old, and each of them faced specific challenges in their personal lives. How people access information, make decisions based on the knowledge available to them, and eventually act upon it is dependent on their unique life stage—we have to factor in age, family responsibilities, location, gender, and education to be effective.

Overall, our research participants are most excited about the concepts that lean towards factory training, localized financial services, and offerings that would cater to family units. Going forward, we also want to further explore the relationship that financial service providers have with their local factories to improve access, relevancy, and adoption. We’re excited to continue testing and fleshing out these solutions within the coming months.

– Celestine Njuguna, Program Lead @ IDEO.org

Original Source: Designing for Agency and Resilience
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-agency-resilience-ideo-org