Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

Conversations on personal financial practices are sensitive and many times difficult forresearchers to actualize in the field. As many researchers have documented, personalfinancial practices are private. Getting people to talk about them often times requiresgreat effort. Adding culture to these conversations creates a further challenge that seems almost insurmountable. Yet, even with all of these challenges, it is essential tounderstand how culture influences mobile money practices if appropriate policies andprograms are to be put in place.

To get women micro-entrepreneurs conversing on these matters, we designed two charts: a static one (Fig. 1) which we used to prompt participants to think through their financial practices (without intervention on our part) and an interactive one (Fig. 3) which required participants to perform some activities. Our approach was inspired by the IMTFI Fellows workshop held at the IMTFI Insight and Impact Conference on April 22, 2016 and by object-centered interview methodologies featured in IMTFI’s Consumer Finance Research Methods Toolkit.