Professor Dan Ariely and his team from Center for Advanced Hindsight (CAH) have been engaged in multiple concrete implementation research projects in Kenya together with JLI’s partner organizations PharmAccess and CarePay. We are working to help make the M-Tiba health wallet more effective by discovering ways to encourage users to set funds aside for healthcare and health insurance.
Intervention 1: Savings Simulation RCT
How it works: The field of Behavioral Economics has repeatedly shown that information ≠ understanding. But, we also know that behavioral fluency can help, and is also the first step towards developing a habit. CAH tested whether having beneficiaries “practice” depositing into M-TIBA 4x might help.
Results: Our results show that the simple intervention nearly doubled savings in the following two months. Practicing savings four times while being enrolled onto the platform, increased the odds of saving from 1.6 to 5.3 times within the first 90 days after the intervention compared to those who did not practice.
Intervention 2: Savings Calendar Test
How it works: This user-centric research helped us anticipate if and how beneficiaries would use the calendar. These conversations led us to make changes to the calendar design, such as maximizing the calendar dates that increased its usability.
Results: Though the qualitative user-research increased our confidence that the calendar would help savers, the intervention wasn’t complete until tested through the rigorous process of the experimental approach: overall speaking, the calendars with nudges lead to almost twice amount of savings than those without.
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