SmartChama: Designing collaborative digital financial systems for chama groups in Kenya

Abstract

In Kenya there are over 300,000 "chamas". These groups provide social and financial support for their members and have around $3.4 billion in assets. Despite widespread mobile phone use in Kenya, there are few efforts to develop digital services for chamas. We describe the design, and formative evaluation of 'SmartChama' - -a prototype mobile app developed to understand activities in chamas and how to digitize them. We used contextual inquiry to understand how seven chama groups (n=48 participants) used our prototype to manage and track their finances. Based on our findings, we iterated SmartChama's design and then evaluated it with seven groups. Findings from this evaluation suggest different chama activities that should be considered when designing digital financial systems for these groups. We discuss these design implications and offer new perspectives on designing financial systems in Kenya.