- Project report
Government Enterprise Empowerment Program (GEEP)
- August 13, 2019
- 10:42 pm
SECTOR
PROJECT TYPE
DOI
Location
BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
As a part of the first Policy Innovation Unit in Nigeria – a consortium of organizations established to improve the efficacy and delivery of social protection programs – We designed and tested the effect of social comparison SMS prompts on repayment among beneficiaries of the largest micro-credit scheme in Africa, Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme (GEEP), in a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT).
THEMATIC AREAS
For this, 60,000 GEEP MarketMoni beneficiaries were assigned to one of four color categories based on pre-defined criteria related to their outstanding payment. Within each color category, beneficiaries were randomly assigned to either control or treatment groups after which they received an SMS every 2 weeks (over a 6-week period) informing them of their color category based on their outstanding repayment. Following the lapse of the intervention period were as follows:
- Across all colors, beneficiaries in the treatment groups paid, on average, 19% more than those in the control group
- Beneficiaries in the orange color category treatment had 56.9% higher repayments compared to their counterparts who were in the control group.