Mbrella is a charitable organization devoted to helping impoverished Kenyan families buy health insurance. Mbrella connects donors with Kenyan mothers and employs a number of behavioral interventions meant to help the mother gain enough financial stability to be able to eventually, over time afford insurance for the family on her own. One such intervention is the Mbrella Calendar, which was designed with the help of CAH to leverage a number of behavioral insights. The calendar is meant to help Kenyan mothers overcome barriers such as lack of social support, an environment designed with temptation and instant gratification at its core, and the basic difficulty of keeping track of one’s progress, which can all derail good intentions.

View the Mbrella Calendar Here

In designing the calendar, we first wanted to tackle issues of social support. In order to do this, we sought to engender a sense of collective responsibility within the family. Typically, mothers are in charge of healthcare for the household, but fathers tend to be in charge of finances. Rather than putting all of the responsibility on one member of the family, we wanted the family to see itself as a group reaching towards a collective goal. At the very top of the calendar, we have “Team [family surname]’s Savings Calendar” written, where the family will write in their name. This is designed to encourage family members to think of this as a goal that the family will be pursuing as a unit. Also, at the top of the calendar, there is a story that outlines a hypothetical family’s savings journey with Mbrella – which demonstrates the importance of having the entire family save for health insurance.

Typically, mothers are in charge of healthcare for the household, but fathers tend to be in charge of finances.

The next design feature leverages prior work demonstrating that developing concrete plans leads to a higher likelihood of goal achievement. We have included boxes over the days of the week so that families can choose on which days they intend to save. Underneath the calendar itself, we have instructions for how to save for insurance using the mobile M-TIBA wallet (including the relevant account and phone numbers needed to save), and a way to keep track of savings using the calendar. Even something as simple as forgetting the account number can act as a significant barrier to action, so it is important to provide easily accessible reminders.

Finally, at the bottom of the calendar we have a gamified savings system that helps families track savings each month while also providing an element of fun. Football (soccer) is a very popular sport in Kenya, so we thought creating a tracking system that mimicked a football match could help to involve the children in the savings process. Hopefully, by involving the children, we can reinforce the value of saving for health insurance for the parents, and provide a model of savings behavior for those children as they grow up. Families are given a sheet of stickers with football stickers for each month that they need to save. One sticker represents 10 Kenyan Shilling. Each time they save, they add a football (or multiple footballs if they save more than 10 Shilling at a time) to the football field to track their progress from one end of the field to the goal. Along the way, we have added “defenders” that need to be avoided, which are pictures of temptations (e.g., clothes, fast food, soda) that Kenyans have reported wanting to cut down on to reduce spending.

On the sticker sheet, we have photos of each temptation, with a corresponding number of footballs that each temptation would cost. This should help members think in terms of health insurance savings when dealing with temptation. Reaching the goal means that a family has successfully saved for a month. If the family fails to reach their goal for a month, they will be given a fresh start when they flip the calendar to the next page. Fresh starts can provide a renewed motivation towards a goal, focusing them on the future rather than the past. Finally, whereas the football field acts as a short time-scale tracker and is meant to be the primary area of focus for the family, the sticker sheet also acts as a tracker towards the ultimate goal, as individuals can determine how far they need to go to reach their final goal by counting the number of stickers left on the sheet.

When it comes to helping families save for health insurance, Mbrella wants each of its interventions to tackle as many potential barriers as possible. The Mbrella calendar epitomizes this approach by providing solutions for socio-cultural and individual barriers. Whereas the calendar seeks to solve a number of problems, no one intervention can do it all. This is why Mbrella is rolling out several behavioral interventions over time which will be integrated with the calendar to help support the savings system set up by the calendar and tackle issues not accounted for by the calendar intervention. If you are interested in finding out more about the behavioral interventions being used by Mbrella, or if you like the idea of supporting families as they work towards being able to buy insurance on their own, please visit the Mbrella site.

Jonathan Corbin is a Senior Behavioral Researcher at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, an applied behavioral science research lab that helps people be happier, healthier, and wealthier. You can reach him at jonathan.corbin@duke.edu

Is your organization in any other way interested in health research with CAH? Contact Jan Willem Lindemans, Principal, at jan.lindemans@duke.edu.

The post The Mbrella Calendar: Helping Kenyan Families Track Their Savings for Health Insurance appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

If you’re a policy maker launching a new program, then you might have to consider how to get your target audience to take up and engage with the program. That is, you’re pondering how to encourage a new behavior. Oftentimes, the challenge is that even when the target audience says that a program is desirable, people’s actions often don’t reflect their intentions.

When new programs struggle to catch on, it might appear that it is because they failed to convince people of the merits of program, or because they failed to provide enough information. However, we question whether in some cases, the problem is actually a lack of fluency rather than a lack of information or desire.

To answer this question, the CAH World team partnered with the PharmAccess Foundation, who conducted a randomized controlled trial of a CAH-developed intervention in Kenya. Participants included 220 new and expecting mothers who were being enrolled into a subsidized health insurance program. In this program, each mother was given one year of free health insurance for her and her family, but could extend the health cover for a second year if she saved a total of 3,000 Kenyan Shillings (KSh) (about $30) within one year. Savings were made in M-TIBA* which is a digital wallet similar to Venmo or Paypal, but exclusively for healthcare transactions.

The intervention

The intervention involved helping participants to practice depositing money into M-TIBA during on-boarding. Mothers randomly assigned to the treatment group practiced making four deposits. After each deposit, an onboarding agent instructed the participant to notice a confirmation SMS sent to their phone and provided positive reinforcement, e.g., “nice job, you’re remembering how to save on your own!” Participants were randomly assigned to receive the practice intervention or not, but all participants were given the same explanation and information about how to make a deposit. Other manipulations included the size of the total amount deposited and whether the money the participant used to deposit was the participant’s own money, or was “gifted” money.

Results

Overall, the practice intervention nearly doubled savings behavior. Within 3 months of the intervention, the proportion of individuals who made 1+ deposits increased from 24% to 46%, and the total average amount saved increased from KSh 64 ($0.64) to KSh 138 ($1.38).

Interestingly, the practice intervention was found to be even more effective when participants deposited their own money versus gifted money. Mothers who practiced by depositing their own money saved an average of KSh 174, while those who practiced by depositing gifted money saved KSh 113 (excluding any money saved on the day of on-boarding). There was something particularly motivating about choosing to invest one’s own resources in the practice.

What could explain this?

We think effects such as the self-herding bias or the sunk cost fallacy may have played a role here. Still, it’s worth pointing out how the result runs counter to what we’d expect if humans were perfectly rational. Those who used their own money to make the practice deposits are immediately “poorer” compared to those who used gifted money. That is, the group that used their own money voluntarily “spent” some of their available money. The group that used gifted money didn’t spend any of their available money. Given this, you would expect the “poorer” group to save less than the group who hadn’t spent any money yet. Yet, here we see the opposite: spending money on savings leads to even more savings.

Why was the practice intervention effective?

It seems that practicing increased fluency in the steps of depositing as well as confidence in being able to save. At the end of the onboarding interaction, participants were asked if they could recall the account number required to make a deposit in M-TIBA. Those who did not practice making deposits recalled this number accurately 55% of the time compared to 93% of those who practiced. A similar difference was found between the two groups’ confidence that they could meet their savings goal.

This study has important implications for policy makers who are considering how to encourage users or citizens to adopt a new behavior. While ensuring users have adequate information and a desire to perform the behavior is important, we argue that these aren’t enough. This experiment illuminates one way in which a program can help users become fluent and confident in a desired behavior. Importantly, the evidence shows that this intervention can have a significant impact.

Are you interested in this partnership? Contact Matt Bodien, Joep Lange Institute Partnership Lead, at matt.bodien@duke.edu.

Is your organization interested in CAH Global? Contact Jan Lindemans, Principal of CAH Global, at jan.lindemans@duke.edu.

* M-TIBA is a digital savings platform developed and operated by the PharmAccess Foundation and CarePay International, and supported by the Joep Lange Institute. All organizations are partners of the Center for Advanced Hindsight.

The post The Power of Practice: How To Increase People’s Savings appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

Discussions about health insurance reform have recently occupied brilliant minds around the world. Last month, Ting Jiang, Principal of the global team, gave a talk about the role of behavioral technology in health insurance innovation and reform at the China International Health Insurance & Health Financing Innovation Forum in Shanghai. Ting described behavioral tech as akin to financial technology (fintech), which refers to new technology that seeks to improve and automate financial services. “Behavioral tech,” on the other hand, can be used to refer to new technology that improves and automates human participation (i.e., behavioral uptake) in products, services, and programs.

She stated that systematic application of behavioral tech could be the next breakthrough of innovation in healthcare, and an opportunity that one should not miss. She pointed out that the emphasis of any public debate so far is too much on who is paying and how to increase the ability to pay, and too little on how to reduce cost by using policies and infrastructural supports to promote health. The cumulative cost of chronic disease in middle- and low-income countries is expected to increase to $11.2 trillion by 2030. Speeding up the development of new medicines and medical treatment needs to go hand in hand with the development of behavioral treatment to curb the rapid increase of chronic diseases caused mainly by lifestyle choices. In other words, unlocking human potential to prevent unnecessary illness can and will help save healthcare.

For more on behavioral tech and product examples of behavioral tech created by our own lab, be on the lookout for Ting’s blog post in next month’s newsletter. And if you think behavioral uptake is one of your core challenges, get in touch with one of the CAH principals! There’s a chance we could help you apply behavioral tech to solve your problem.

Ting Jiang is Principal of Global at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, an applied behavioral science research lab that helps people be happier, healthier, and wealthier. You can reach her at t.jiang@duke.edu

Ciara Lutz is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, an applied behavioral science research lab that helps people be happier, healthier, and wealthier. You can reach her at ciara.lutz@duke.edu

The post Can Behavioral Tech Help Save Healthcare? appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

The World Health Organization estimated that over 150,000 Kenyan children died from preventable causes in 2011 alone. One reason is that people simply cannot afford to get treatment for themselves or their children, particularly those living in the slums. A simple cough can quickly become pneumonia if untreated. When faced with a seemingly minor illness, parents making less than $1.50 a day have to make tough decisions between basic necessities like food, shelter, and medical care. Saving for health can be difficult, but life-saving.

M-TIBA is a free health savings wallet that is stored on a mobile phone. A Kenyan can sign up for M-TIBA and then save as little as 10 cents at a time, but this money can only be used for health expenses. If the individual saves one dollar in a month, then M-TIBA provides a bonus of 50 cents. The goal is to save little by little so that when a health issue arises, the individual can dip into the M-TIBA wallet to pay for medical care.

Unfortunately, while enrollment in M-TIBA has been high (over one million users since its start in May 2016), savings rates have been low. Most users have never saved in their health wallets. The Center for Advanced Hindsight’s Global Health and Development Team has worked with its partners, the PharmAccess Foundation and CarePay, to increase savings in these health wallets.

The Power of Anchoring

People are often influenced by the first piece of information that is offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions. They then base subsequent decisions on this anchor. For example, imagine a person sees a phone that costs $1,000 on a website. They are now anchored to this amount. Thus, if the person sees that the phone is selling for $900 a week later, she would think that this is a great deal.

The global team applied the insight of anchoring to the case of M-TIBA, hypothesizing that people are anchored to saving one dollar, since M-TIBA heavily promotes the bonus of 50 cents for a dollar saved. This amount might be too high, as the average Kenyan living in the slums of Nairobi makes less than $1.50 per day. If a person does not readily have one dollar to save, then this might be a barrier for depositing at all. A lower anchor might increase the number of users depositing by lowering that barrier. CAH and its partners decided to test this idea via text messages. M-TIBA users were sent two different text messages – one with an anchor of 10 cents and one with an anchor of one dollar:

1. “Save 100 KSh in M-TIBA, and unlock 50 KSh bonus this month.”
2. “Save as little as 10 KSh in M-TIBA, and unlock 50 KSh bonus if you save at least 100 KSh this month.”

As we hypothesized, the lower anchor increased the percentage of people saving: 3.4% saved in the 100 KSh (one dollar) anchor group while 4.8% saved in the 10 KSh (10 cent) anchor group. The lower anchor also increased the percentage of repeat savers from 0.6% to 1.1%. However, the lower anchor led to a lower amount of savings for those who actually saved: the most frequent deposit amount was 10 KSh in the low anchor group versus 100 KSh in the high anchor group. In addition, the median amount saved was 50 KSh in the low anchor group, compared with 100 KSh in the high anchor group.

Implications

These results illustrate the potentially powerful impact anchoring can have on saving. When considering any new product or intervention, one should pay special attention to the following:

• Anchors can encourage or discourage people to save, so thought should be given to the initial amount that is asked. If it’s too high, people won’t save. If it’s too low, people may not save as much as they can. If possible, a test should be conducted to determine the optimal amount.
• Anchors will also have an effect on the number of times people save, so it is important to find the balance between the number of user deposits and the amount saved.
• Different anchors may be more appropriate for different objectives. A lower anchor may be more useful to get people to begin using a product or intervention, whereas a higher anchor may be better to increase savings among those already engaged.

Anchors offer a great tool for savings programs to increase engagement. In the case of M-TIBA, lowering the anchor provided a substantial increase in the number of savers, which is important considering the lack of even one-time depositors in the program. An increase in saving for health by those who are most vulnerable to health shocks provides a concrete way to lower the number of preventable deaths in Kenya. If a child gets sick, a parent who saved in M-TIBA little by little is more likely to immediately take the child to a clinic for treatment, so the cough never becomes pneumonia. The smallest change in the framing of the reminder can save lives.

Judson Bonick is a Senior Behavioral Researcher with the Global Team at The Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University.

Ting Jiang is Principal of Global Health and Development at The Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, an applied behavioral science research lab that helps people be happier, healthier, and wealthier.

The post Increasing Health Savings by Using Anchors appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

Global team members Ting Jiang, Jan Willem Lindemans, and Rebecca Kelley attended the 8th Games for Health Europe conference in Eindhoven, the Netherlands between October 8-9. The largest conference on games for health in Europe, it brings together medical professionals, academics, and game developers from the field of applied health games to discuss using game technologies to improve health and the delivery of healthcare.

Ting Jiang, Principal of CAH’s Global Health and Development team, gave the opening keynote about the important role that behavioral science can play in creating more impactful games and gamification features, especially for health-related behavioral change. In her talk, Ting used the example of designing a game aimed at increasing medication adherence and explained that a behavioral diagnosis is necessary to determine the extent to which non-adherence is caused by: lack of intention vs. intention-behavior gap, social vs. individual factors, and system II (deliberative) vs. system I (automatic) thinking.

(Photo: “Happy Money” game playtest in Kibera)

Ting noted that applying behavioral science tools early in the game development process leads to more accurate identification and measurement of behavioral change progress and permits experimentation aimed at identifying the most effective game components. She also gave examples of games developed by CAH, including the board game “Happy Money,” which is designed to help individuals with low income make better daily spending and saving decisions, in order to reduce deaths from lack of health financing for curable diseases. “Bill Thrill,” a cashier training game funded by the Joep Lange Institute, is another example of how games can be used to promote effective behavioral change. After identifying a core behavioral barrier of health clinic cashiers shying away from the use of a new digital transaction platform, the team gamified this real-life challenge to improve cashiers billing skills and increase their professional pride, with the aim of increasing behavioral uptake of the new platform and self-efficacy.

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Together with the Joep Lange Institute and the Amsterdam Health and Technology Institute (AHTI), the Global team hosted a workshop titled “A healthier, wealthier Africa: Behavioural science, digital innovation, and beyond” on August 8th, at Strathmore University.

The workshop speakers brought a range of experiences in entrepreneurship, academia, experimental design, and change leadership to talks and a panel exploring what behaviorally informed-solutions for financial inclusion, wellness, and poverty alleviation can look like now and in the future.

The event built on increasing recognition of the importance of embedding behavioural science into designing for impact, and was an example of how international partnerships are approaching conversations around innovations in fighting poverty and healthcare financing.

Dan Ariely commented about this event:

“In general we make lots of attempts to try and get people to behave in a way that is in their own long term best interests, but when we make these attempts without understanding the true nature of human behaviour, these attempts are very likely to fail. This is the same for human beings across the world, from East Africa to Europe or the US. What behavioural economics gives us is a true foundation to understanding what really drives behaviour. With plans for Universal Health Coverage, Kenya is at an important juncture in making progress toward health and wellness. When we create interventions with behavioural economics incorporated, we are much more likely to succeed, so I’m excited about the conversations happening in Nairobi and across the continent, now and into the future.”

The following are 4 key takeaways from the presentations:

• Behavioral Science has the potential to bridge the intention-behavior gap.

Principal of Global Health and Development, Ting Jiang, gave examples of how behavioral science can save lives by enabling practitioners to make more accurate problem diagnoses and apply BE informed interventions that bridge the gap between intention and behavior.

• Digital Innovation can help improve the mental health of a population

With lack of access, price, and stigma as the leading roadblocks to accessing mental health services in Kenya, Alex Royea gave an excellent presentation on how Amka Life is using bots to make mental health services more accessible. You can read more on this from his presentation:  Using Bots and Tech to Scale Mental Health Solutions.

• Experimental design is extremely important to Behavioral Science

David Clarance painted a clear picture of the importance of testing Behavioral Science solutions based on previous research. You can read more on this from his presentation: Experiment Design in Practice.

• Implementing sustainable healthcare solutions in action

Access Afya runs low-cost, affordable clinics within Nairobi tailored for the global mass market. The organization also sells health subscriptions to factories and schools. On the other hand, ahti supports entrepreneurs, both start-ups and scale-ups, to generate solutions for better health, care, and costs by providing hands-on mentorship and access to their extensive network of healthcare institutions. You can read more on these in Melissa Menke’s and Laurens Van Hoorn’s presentations.

The post Can We Create a Healthier, Wealthier Africa with Behavioural Science? appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

Last month, we asked you to predict which of three SMS reminders led to the greatest savings on the M-Tiba* health saving wallet. Our Global Health and Development team supported a test conducted by our partners, the Joep Lange Institute and PharmAccess Foundation.

Three messages were sent to M-Tiba users every Saturday during December 2017:

Control: Remember to save as little as 10/- today!

Social Proof: Remember to save as little as 10/- today. Every Saturday, thousands of M-PESA users save in M-TIBA.

Voucher: Remember to save as little as 10/- today to get a voucher of 500/-. Extra bonus for Savings on Saturdays this month.

We asked you, dear readers, to guess which message led the greatest proportion of M-Tiba users to save. Only 7% of you correctly guessed that the short control message without social proof or voucher was actually the most effective in prompting M-Tiba users to save! 10.35% of those who received a simple reminder to “save as little as 10/-“ deposited at least once in M-Tiba, while just 5% who received the Voucher message and 4.15% who received the Social Proof message did so.

We predicted that the social proof message would lead to greater savings than the control message, because people tend to follow the behavior of their peers. Once we see a multitude of other people behaving in a certain way, we may conclude that the way they are acting is likely the “right” way. So, if people perceive that their peers are saving in M-Tiba on Saturdays, they should follow suit.

We also predicted that the voucher message would lead people to save, because it provides a compelling financial incentive to do so. If your goal is to maximize the amount of money in your health savings account, why wouldn’t you deposit in M-Tiba if more money would be deposited in your account as a result?

Although previous data indicated that people tend to deposit into M-Tiba on Saturdays, it is possible that some users perceived the Saturday “Savings Day” promotions as irrelevant or even restricting if they were not planning to save on Saturdays. Users may have gotten the wrong impression that they should only save on Saturdays. Thus, they might have refrained from saving on other days, even if it would have been more convenient for them.

In addition, the shorter control message is easier for people to quickly read and understand compared to the more complicated promotions included in the voucher and savings. There is also a potential danger of a longer message triggering “overthinking” about the decision of saving. Based on these findings, M-Tiba plans to keep sending the short winning message of “Remember to save as little as 10/- today!”

This example also illustrates why it’s important to test interventions before they are widely implemented. Even behavioral scientists sometimes incorrectly predict how people will behave! The conditions we intuitively think will lead to the greatest health savings are not always the most effective.

Congratulations to Sally, the lucky winner of our last predicting game prize! An ebook copy of Dollars and Sense has been sent to you via email.

This concludes the Global Health predicting game series. We thank you for your participation! Just because the predicting games are over doesn’t mean you’ll stop hearing from us! Stay tuned to read more behavioral insights from the Global Health team.

* M-Tiba is digital health platform that includes a wallet on a mobile phone containing specified entitlements for healthcare. Users can use this wallet to save (for their family’s health), get insurance, receive money from more affluent relatives elsewhere in the country, from donors, and even from individuals in other countries willing to donate directly for health (remittances).

The post Predicting Game: Global Health Part 4 appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

In our last post, we told you about a behavioral intervention that our Global Health and Development team developed that was tested by our partners, the Joep Lange Institute and PharmAccess Foundation.

In this intervention, a few different types of calendars were given to people attending medical camps (where they received free medical care) in Nairobi, Kenya. The goal of this intervention was to increase health savings on a mobile wallet that is locked for health expenses – the M-Tiba platform.*

One challenge for M-Tiba users is that they fail to deposit after signing up, even though most users strongly agree that saving for health is very important.

Figure 1: The story calendar

Our partners tested CAH-created calendars – some used storytelling (Figure 1) and goal-setting and planning (Figure 2). Based on a previous predicting game, we already knew that the storytelling calendar led to greater savings compared to the control calendar. We asked you to guess whether the storytelling or goal-setting calendar would lead to greater health savings on the M-Tiba platform.

Figure 2: The goal-setting calendar

Only 29% of you correctly predicted that the goal-setting calendar led to greater savings compared to the storytelling calendar, and that this difference was not significant. As you might recall from our last post, 7.5% of those who received the storytelling calendar saved at least once, compared to 0% of those who received the control calendar. Of those who received the goal-setting calendar, however, 12.8% saved at least once.

Moreover, men and women seem to have different expenses in mind to cut down on:

Figure 3: Unnecessary spending reported by women (left) and men (right). The size of each word indicates the number of times each word was reported.

Although the “story editing” approach leveraged by the storytelling calendar effectively increased savings, goal-setting was just as effective. While the storytelling calendar may have led people to change the narratives they usually tell themselves about saving, the goal-setting and planning calendar forced users to interact with the calendar more often.

Since a simple M-Tiba branded calendar did not increase saving, it is possible that users did not actively engage with this calendar as much as they did with the other two. It is conceivable that including a story or asking people to write down a savings goal served as more engaging reminders, making M-Tiba users more likely to save.

Figure 4: The control calendar

If you missed last month’s predicting game, or would like to try your hand at a predicting game that has nothing to do with calendars, check out this month’s game:

Another way in which we can try to increase savings is by sending SMS reminders. This month, we are asking you to guess which of three SMS reminders led to the greatest savings in M-Tiba. The three messages, always sent on Saturdays, were:

Control: Remember to save as little as 10/- today!

Social Proof: Remember to save as little as 10/- today. Every Saturday, thousands of M-PESA users save in M-TIBA.

Voucher: Remember to save as little as 10/- today to get a voucher of 500/-. Extra bonus for Savings on Saturdays this month.

Which of these three SMS reminders led to the greatest savings? Make your guess via this link. If you guess correctly, your foresight could win you a free e-book!

We would also like to congratulate Patrick, the lucky winner of our last predicting game! A free ebook copy of Dollars and Sense has been sent to you a via email.

* M-Tiba is digital health platform that includes a wallet on a mobile phone containing specified entitlements for healthcare. Users can use this wallet to save (for their family’s health), get insurance, receive money from more affluent relatives elsewhere in the country, from donors, and even from individuals in other countries willing to donate directly for health (remittances).

The post Predicting Game: Global Health Part 3 appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

And the lucky winner is…. Thais! Congratulations, you have won a free ebook copy of Dollars and Sense! The ebook has been sent to you via email.

Figure 1: The story calendar

As most of you guessed, the storytelling calendar led to greater savings than the control calendar. Our implementation partner measured the proportion of participants that saved at least once within the first three months after receiving the calendar and found that no one – 0% –  in the group that received the control calendar saved, while 7.5% of those who received the storytelling calendar saved at least once.

So, why did the storytelling calendar trigger more savings behavior? The intervention leveraged the so-called “story editing” approach to behavior change that aims to access and change the narratives that people tell themselves about who they are and why they behave the way they do. This “story editing” or “story prompting” approach, advocated by psychologists such as Dr. Timothy D. Wilson, exposes people to structured scenarios (a.k.a. stories) that prompt them to change their self-views and the personal narratives that they tell themselves.

Figure 2: The control calendar

If you recall, in the story, Joseph learns about M-Tiba at his local clinic, signs up, and begins to save regularly on the platform. When his daughter falls ill, he is able to comfort his worried wife with the news that he has enough saved in M-Tiba to pay for their daughter’s medical bills. While this might sound normal to you, this is actually portraying a relatively unusual scenario. In Kenya, the women in the household, rather than the men, typically are in charge of their household’s health, including saving for health expenses. Men are less expected to save for healthcare, and they are also less likely to identify themselves as savers.

The story of Joseph regularly saving for health expenses and being psychologically rewarded with a sense of pride for properly caring for his family potentially prompted some participants, especially men, to change their personal narratives with respect to health savings. It also potentially makes the norm of savings more salient. You might wonder what would have happened if the protagonist of the story were Mary instead of Joseph. Would it have the same impact? Would a story of Joseph trigger more men to save, whereas a story of Mary would trigger more women to save? We are also curious about this, and are currently working with our partners to help them run a study to compare the impact of these two stories on savings, changing only the gender of the protagonist. Stay tuned for the findings in one of our future newsletters!

If you missed out on last month’s predicting game, have no fear! We have prepared another iteration of the predicting game for this month.

What if there were another condition in the calendar study? What if some participants received a goal-setting and planning calendar that would allow them to set a monthly savings goal, circle the planned saving dates on the calendar, and specify 3 unnecessary expenses to cut down on?

How do you think this calendar would compare to the storytelling calendar? Would the goal-setting and planning calendar be more or less effective compared to the storytelling calendar? Make a guess via this link. If you guess correctly, your foresight could win you a free e-book!

The post Predicting Game: Global Health Part 2 appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.

One challenge for M-TIBA users is that they fail to deposit after signing up, even though a majority of the users we surveyed strongly agree that saving for health is very important.

Upon the news of a calendar give-away for new M-TIBA users, our global team created an alternative calendar that embedded a story about a Kenyan family’s journey in saving for healthcare.  Our partners distributed the calendars to people who attended medical camps (where they received free medical care) in Nairobi, Kenya. Participants received one of the following two calendars:

Control – Half of the participants received a standard calendar with brand images.

Story – Half of the participants received a calendar with a sequence of illustrations describing a story about a father saving in M-TIBA. The father learns about M-TIBA at his local clinic, signs up, and begins to save regularly on the platform. When his daughter falls ill, he is able to comfort his worried wife with the news that he has enough saved on M-TIBA to pay for their daughter’s medical bills. The last illustration is of the daughter sleeping soundly in her bed while the mother expresses pride that her husband took such good care of their daughter.

So, what is your guess? Which calendar triggers more savings in the mobile wallet M-TIBA? If you guess correctly, your Advanced Foresight will earn you a chance to win a special prize!

You can take the survey here! Stay tuned to see if your prediction was correct!

* M-Tiba is digital health platform that includes a wallet on a mobile phone containing specified entitlements for healthcare. Users can use this wallet to save (for their family’s health), get insurance, receive money from more affluent relatives elsewhere in the country, from donors, and even from individuals in other countries willing to donate directly for health (remittances).

The post Predicting Game: Global Health appeared first on Center for Advanced Hindsight.