Improving Access to Finance

Last registered on October 22, 2025
View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Improving Access to Finance
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0011825
Initial registration date
August 02, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
August 10, 2023, 1:19 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
October 22, 2025, 5:27 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country
Sierra Leone
Region

Primary Investigator

Name
Francis Annan
Affiliation
University of California, Berkeley
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2022-06-01
End date
2025-12-31
Keywords
Finance & Microfinance, Firms & Productivity
Additional Keywords
Market Design, Retail DFS, Service Quality, VSLAs-as-Agents, Consumer Evaluations
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Access to finance remains a crucial barrier for economic development, particularly in rural areas lacking formal financial institutions. In the absence of formal financial institutions, Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) have emerged to partially fill the void, providing limited, informal financial services to their few select members. How might we design and improve access to finance in these markets with latent demand for financial services? In a randomized experiment with the largest service providers in Sierra Leone, we (i) "upgrade" VSLAs to operate as providers of retail mobile money and bank agents across rural unserved, virgin communities. We cross-randomize this with a (ii) feedback mechanism, letting consumers "evaluate" their providers monthly. We then measure effects on broader access to finance, households, and business outcomes, including on consumer satisfaction, complementary effects (if any) on VSLAs, behavior of providers, and the relationship between providers and consumers.

Indeed, connecting rural unserved, virgin communities with latent demand for retail digital financial services (DFS) is an important first order policy and commercial question. Perhaps, more important and distinct is our ability to improve the new markets once communities are connected. This project addresses major gaps in research about improving access to finance with (i) original data collection — on household, community, and business outcomes — and (ii) a multi-year community-level field experiment testing a scalable approach to retail agent expansions, VSLAs-as-agents. We follow the success of our 2019/2020 detailed pilot work to launch a full RCT in rural Sierra Leone—a market environment that is poorly studied—to answer the following two research questions:

1) RQ1. What are the broader, general equilibrium impacts of connecting unserved, virgin communities with retail DFS?
2) RQ2. Once connected, could letting consumers evaluate their providers improve the quality of services, consumer usage and satisfaction, provider effort, provider-customer relationships, and business outcomes, and if so, how?

In a unique collaboration with Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), Orange Money, GT Bank, and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) - Sierra Leone, we implement a large-scale community-level field experiment that encourage Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) to set up and operate as retail DF agents across rural unserved communities in Sierra Leone. Agents or providers are established to offer both mobile money (via Orange Money) and bank services (via GT Bank) in 3 separate phases that span 2022-2024. This is an environment where the penetration of DFS is extremely low and retail agents or providers of formal finance are “non-existent” in these rural communities, but with latent demand and supply for DFS.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Annan, Francis. 2025. "Improving Access to Finance." AEA RCT Registry. October 22. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.11825-1.1
Sponsors & Partners

Sponsors

Partner

Name
Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD)
Type
ngo
URL
https://cafod.org.uk
Name
GT Bank
Type
private_company
URL
https://www.gtb.sl
Name
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) - Sierra Leone
Type
ngo
URL
https://poverty-action.org/sierraleone
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The study will include two interventions meant to connect unserved communities to retail agents. First, to examine the broader impacts of providers of formal finance expansions, we encourage and onboard existing VSLAs as agents (VSLAs-as-agents) in randomly selected communities (Treatment I). Second, to test improvements in quality of services, consumer protection practices and consumer usage of DFS, we additionally implement a simple, anonymized feedback mechanism that provides monthly consumer feedback—based on digitized new user reviews or evaluations—to retailers and the community in a random set of connected communities (Treatment II). We implement monthly consumer evaluations and feedback loops to providers.
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2022-06-01
Intervention End Date
2024-06-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
For RQ1, we will compare the various Treatments versus Control.
o Key outcomes:
(i) take-up (0/1 indicator for sustained presence of retail agent in community);
(ii) % of people that use financial/DF services (access);
(iii) % of people that engage in money management, such as savings, budgeting, and loan management (utilization and/or knowledge);
(iv) enterprise and VSLA groups sales revenue, number of customers, labor supply (operational hours), business income, assets, and business expenses (enterprise development);
(v) services/DFS quality;
(vi) women/adolescents’ empowerment and agency, including downstream outcomes;
(vii) household expenses/consumption; (viii) shocks mitigation;
(ix) poverty at the community level;
(x) local multiplier (and velocity of money);
(xi) similar outcomes under RQ2 below.

For RQ2, we will compare Treatments 1 versus 2.
o Key outcomes:
(i) services/DFS quality (prices, transparency, reliability, customer service);
(ii) consumers usage of DFS; reported happiness; well-being; perceptions/views;
(iii) business income/outcomes;
(iv) relationship between providers and consumer.
(v) similar outcomes under RQ1 above.


These broader impacts allow us to measure general equilibrium effects: (i) direct effects (businesses /VSLAs) and (ii) indirect effects (households e.g., consumption expenditure, shocks mitigation; vs community e.g., poverty, local multiplier; vs providers e.g., revenues).
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We explore two experimental variations:
(i) randomized entry of VSLAs-as-retail agents (Treatment I: i.e., upgrade VSLAs to operate as providers of formal finance) and
(ii) randomized entry of VSLAs-as-retail agents, combined with a consumer feedback mechanism (Treatment II).

*Control communities (Status Quo): No introduction of DF-retail agents or consumer feedback mechanism. (n=50 communities/VSLAs);

*Treatment I: To examine the broader impacts of retail agent expansions, we encourage existing VLSAs in select communities to enroll and operate as retail agents for both Orange Money and GT Bank only. (n=75 communities/VSLAs);

*Treatment II: To test improvements in quality of services and consumer usage in DFS, we additionally implement a simple, anonymized feedback mechanism that provides consumer feedback to enrolled retailers and connected communities. (n=75 communities/VSLAs).
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Computer software and simple lotteries, while ensuring balance on baseline characteristics (Bruhn and McKenzie 2009), using baseline information gathered on the communities and VSLAs by our partner CAFOD.
Randomization Unit
Randomization of treatments is at the community-level, stratified based on population of community (high vs low) and number of existing businesses in village (high vs low), yielding 4 unique strata, and all misfits (if any) resolved and randomly assigned.
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
200 communities
Sample size: planned number of observations
*200 communities x 15 households / community members (respondent: hh head or customer) = 3,000 hh surveys; *200 communities x 1 VSLA (respondents: agent and secretary) = 200 businesses; *Customer reviews surveys: 75 review communities x 30 DF customers each x 3 rounds = 6,750 review surveys; *Supplemental administrative data from partner commercial providers (Orange/GT Bank) and CAFOD’s agent monitoring tools - 150 (treatment) communities
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
Control (Status Quo): n=50 communities/VSLAs;
Treatment I: n=75 communities/VSLAs;
Treatment II: n=75 communities/VSLAs.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
NA
IRB Approval Date
2023-08-15
IRB Approval Number
N/A
Analysis Plan

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials