Empathy as Disciplinenot a personality trait

In 2019 I advised a non-profit that made micro-loans to unbanked women running tiny businesses in rural wet markets, mostly mothers working from home, most of them earning just enough to cover the day and, in a good month, a child’s school fees. The platform existed to help those businesses grow, and my job was the tool that would track the lending and the growth.

It was an unusual world to design for. The women organised themselves into small circles of five to ten, and when one of them could not make a repayment, the others covered it between them, so the loan held on trust rather than collateral. There were no accounts and no apps. A facilitator visited each circle every week, handed out the loans in cash, and kept the books by hand, one running ledger of who owed what. As the repayments held, the amounts grew. The whole system ran on those weekly visits and those handwritten pages.

I could not travel to them, so I did the next most thorough thing I could think of. I worked through months of ledgers, regulations, and disbursement records. I wrote out probing questions for the field facilitator to ask on her weekly visits, and I listened to every interview she brought back, some as plain recordings, some as WhatsApp voice notes. It was painstaking, and I was proud of how much of their world I had rebuilt from it. The voice notes had come from phones, and the facilitator mentioned that at her weekly visits the circle’s coordinator held one. From that I concluded the women had phones, and I designed the whole app around that, even letting a few accounts share one device.