The Mechanics of Flight…

Designing Financial Access for Women & Youth

For women entrepreneurs and young earners across Ethiopia, access to credit isn’t theory, it’s mechanics. It’s the daily calibrations of balancing irregular cash flows and strained incomes with trust systems built into equbs and community relationships. Traditional financial tools miss this reality because they weren’t designed with these users in mind.

This gap is what’s driving our latest fintech experiment. We’re designing differently. Instead of forcing women and youth to adapt to rigid models, we’re sitting down with them first —mapping their realities, learning their habits and goals, to prototype a financial solution with genuine impact. 

Instead of asking, “How do they fit the model?” we ask “How the model should fit them?”

What the Mechanics Teach Us:

• Credit is collective: Credit is rarely individual — it’s equbs, family and friends that collectively lift each other up financially so we’re mapping individual credit networks to gage lending caps.

  
  

• Data must be nuanced: Women and youth often lack regular income records or formal transaction histories. We’re developing culturally informed data points that reveal new financial patterns.

  
  

• Trust as Capital: Trust often stands in when collateral is lacking. Reputation as the credit score, not yet recognized by formal systems. Our challenge is making this visible, measurable, and transferable.

This project is still in R&D stealth mode, hence the redacted visuals. We hope to share more updates and demos in the coming volumes. But one lesson is already clear: when we design collaboratively with those excluded from traditional banking systems, financial empowerment doesn’t just expand — it takes flight.

🙋🏾‍♀️ Question for You 👩🏾‍💻:

When you’ve built alongside users, what hidden mechanics did you uncover that outsiders may never have seen?

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