Predicting Game: Global Health

Are you good at predicting things? What about guessing the outcomes of behavioral experiments? Our global health and development team recently partnered with the Joep Lange Institute and PharmAccess Foundation to test the effects of a behavioral intervention on saving for health in a mobile wallet that is locked for health expenses – the M-Tiba wallet.*

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).