Grant Amount: US$ 30,000

Keywords: ECONOMIC, PRODUCTIVITY, SELF-HELP GROUPS, INFORMATION MANAGEMENT, INDIA

Geographic coverage: India

Objective

The objective of this project is to develop a Management Information System (MIS) for self-help group (SHG) operations.

Research context

SHGs, federations and other community-based financial institutions have proven to be effective empowering agents for local communities to achieve sustainable livelihoods and rural development. One of the main limitations for their continued growth and sustainability is the lack of management capacity. The MISSION project is a secure, extensible and easy-to-use MIS to improve financial performance, sustainability and growth of these institutions. Recognizing that such institutions have infinitely varying requirements, this project develops a modular tool-based framework for MIS systems with components that can be used together or separately. The modular system can serve the needs of a wide range of SHGs, from small local institutions all the way to large multi-state networks.

Target beneficiaries

This project benefits thousands of community-based financial institutions that have difficulty collating, analysing and reporting data collected from the field. The project provides a standard set of tools to carry out tasks, ultimately contributing to the competitiveness of these organizations in the formal capital market.

Outputs

The project outputs are a detailed and comprehensive project report that includes: a description of the software design for replication, descriptions of the testing methodology and implementation strategy, observations from training and testing phases, and an analysis of the project results. When complete, detailed hardware and software designs will be made publicly available at no charge.
 
Research results and outcomes

SHGs are cooperative community-based financial institutions, owned and managed by the members themselves. SHGs can group themselves into structures of 20-25 groups called clusters, which are further grouped into larger structures called federations. Federations can legally be registered as non-profit, for-profit or as cooperative entities.

As SHGs mature, they often start to provide financial services to their members such as insurance, savings accounts, fixed-term deposits, and brokering financial agreements with formal entities in the capital market. These require proper accounting standards and financial management tools that produce information acceptable to external regulatory agencies and funding organizations. This can prove to be unmanageable for most SHGs due to the high volume of transactions, remote location of members, and limited capacity of staff to maintain records, produce reports, or use computer systems.

MISSION is a distributed yet integrated top-to-bottom MIS for SHG operations that requires minimum investment in local resources or capacity. The system allows SHGs to ‘outsource’ most of the data processing and management tasks to more capable remote staff, while maintaining the overall ownership and management of their institution and the ability to access accurate relevant financial data. The model is conceived on three levels, a paper-based MIS for accounting in the field, a mobile phone-based application to store and transmit data, and a web-based MIS to process and store data.

The project commenced with a detailed contextual study of the existing documentation practices at the SHG, cluster and federation levels. Based on this study, a paper-based MIS ‘flap-book’ was designed as an easy-to-use ledger for recording and processing of financial and non-financial information. The flap book removes redundancies, streamlines information flows and fills information gaps. The flap-book was piloted for three months with 50 SHGs and later implemented in about 500 SHGs.

The second step was the development of a Customer Account Manager (CAM) framework that provides a way to aggregate data from paper-based records in the field using mobile phones. The driving element of the CAM architecture is a mobile phone application called the CAMBrowser. Users enter information by capturing barcodes using the mobile phone camera, or by entering numbers. The CAMBrowser downloads the information and executes accounting processes in XML-based applications. When a wireless connection is not available, information is cached in the phone's outgoing SMS message queue and automatically sent when the phone is connected. Data is synchronized using get-and-put functions.

The third component is a web-based MIS processing and storage centre. It consists of a database and a set of PHP scripts that allow for data entry and comprehensive financial report generation. The system can be deployed as software in a federation office or as an online server accessible from any Internet access point. If connected by a GSM modem transactions can be sent to the software using a mobile phone.

The project has conducted quantitative and qualitative usability testing. The next step is a pilot implementation in one SHG federation (approximately 100 groups). The web-based MIS will be deployed to provide users with the opportunity to gain familiarity with the computerized records and reports. Once the systems have been tested and firmly established in one federation, the project will document its learning and expand the implementation to cover three other federations in the region. Finally software, documentation and associated tools in will be released as free and open source for use by institutions facing similar challenges.

Duration

Start Date: March 2005
End Date: March 2007
Total duration: 25 Months

Contact information

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, CEO
Ekgaon Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
C 2/6, First Floor, Safdurjung Development Area
New Delhi 110016, India
Telephone: +91 11 4165 7166, +91 11 2653 4990
Fax: +91 11 4165 7167
Email: vijay@ekgaon.com

Website: http://ekgaon.com/?q=node/29

Reference website: http://www.microfinance.in