Overview
Facilitator: Anton Simanowitz
Purpose: This working group has three main objectives: a) Develop guidance and potentially additional practices for the Universal Standards for SEPM related to customer empowerment; b) Develop and test indicators to measure customer empowerment; c) Conduct action research to understand how to improve customer empowerment.
Members: Open to all
Key Resources
From the SPTF Working Group:
- Measuring customer empowerment: indicators to test (author: Anton Simanowitz)
- Customer empowerment action research concept (author: Anton Simanowitz)
- Integrating customer empowerment into the Universal Standards (author: Anton Simanowitz)
- Strengthening Customer Empowerment in ASKI (author: Lalaine Joyas)
- Developing Actions for Customer Empowerment in the Philippines: Sector-level Mapping Feb 2021 (author: Lalaine Joyas)
- Customer Empowerment Initiative 1st Roundtable Discussion
From Microfinance Opportunities:
- Report: Garment Workers Experience with Wage Digitization in Bangladesh. In 2019, SPTF and Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) co-funded a research study, conducted by MFO, to understand the experiences of garment workers in Bangladesh whose employers changed from paying them in cash to paying them digitally, either into a bank or a mobile money account. Among other topics, the research explored how to empower workers to understand the product and use their digitized wages to meet their own personal needs.
From CGAP:
- Customer Empowerment in Finance (author: CGAP)
- Blog from 2017-08-10: No inclusion without customer empowerment (author: CGAP)
- Blog from 2015-08-25: Customer perspectives on customer empowerment (author: CGAP)
Webinars
2019-03-07 kick-off meeting
2019-04-16 meeting on integrating customer
empowerment into the Universal Standards
2019-04-23 meeting on measuring customer empowerment
2019-05-21 meeting on specific indicators that working group members suggest for measuring customer empowerment
2019-06-17 meeting to share M-CRIL’s experience testing customer empowerment indicators within a social rating
Report: Garment Workers Experience with Wage Digitization in Bangladesh. In 2019, SPTF and Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) co-funded a research study, conducted by MFO, to understand the experiences of garment workers in Bangladesh whose employers changed from paying them in cash to paying them digitally, either into a bank or a mobile money account. Among other topics, the research explored how to empower workers to understand the product and use their digitized wages to meet their own personal needs.