Picture a place with little infrastructure and hardly any digital currency. To lend the equivalent of $40US to a microbusiness, a creditor would have to send a truck full of coins and bills bumping over muddy, rutted tracks for hours, accompanied by armed guards. 

No traditional lender would do this, which explains why many African microbusinesses cannot obtain the money they need to grow. Even if loans are available, they carry excessive interest rates because of tricky logistics and high default risk. 

In Niger, microbusinesses represent a huge percentage of commerce. These mostly rural, often women-owned businesses manufacture everything from anti-malarial creams to woven goods and rely on Village Savings and Loan Associations (VLSAs) for saving and borrowing. VSLAs usually consist of ten to 25 self-selected members who contribute to a fund that lends to individual members so they can grow their businesses. These “saving circles” can fund small projects, but microbusinesses operating outside the conventional monetary structure can’t obtain money from traditional lenders for larger initiatives. Economic trust measures like credit scores and borrowing history—critical factors for assessing loan suitability—simply don’t exist outside the formal financial system.