Field Experience: Learnings from our Pilot project in 25 Villages across India

Over the past year Janta has been lending to students and their families in rural Northern India in partnership with the Drishtee Foundation, our first field partner. Through Drishtee's rural network we collected over 100 applicants from 25 villages located in the states of Assam, Bihar, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh. Local Drishtee representatives reached out to their communities to find candidates who wanted to further their education. Our task was to create a model both appropriate and affordable for these rural populations, and to make it widely accessible while catering to local needs. We weren't certain that high-need families would be willing to borrow for education and were impressed by the strong response. The process was not always easy given Assam's language barrier, massive flooding in northern Bihar, and cultural differences between regions, but we learned a lot and were able to make changes based on our experiences. From this pilot we have confirmed that poor families are willing to invest in education and feel confident that our model can reach thousands of students.

We knew that we wanted to work in India because of the depth of extreme poverty and low literacy levels that exist in most areas. We began our process by catering each loan to the individual borrower based on his or her stated cost of tuition, books, uniforms, boarding, tutoring, and transport. During this first round we had 20 variations of our basic loan structure with varying repayment periods, repayment methods, deferral options, and loan amounts. The final loan products were standardized at approximately $100 for primary school for the year, $200 for secondary, and $300 for vocational training based on the average costs associated with education throughout the four states we tested.

Although our product and operations have changed many times over the past year, our vision had stayed the same: provide affordable education loans and scholarships to those who lack educational opportunity. In the end we were able to successfully run 98 student loans over a large geographical area, with plenty of learning and growth along the way. We plan to launch our scholarship program for high-need and high-potential students within the next few months as we scale up our service. Our aim is to make a microloan or scholarship available to any student in the world who wants to invest in her education.