Fido recently had the opportunity to host a team of students from Harvard Business School in Accra for one week as part of a required course called the FIELD Immersion. Fido was one of 171 FIELD Immersion Project Partners spanning 15 cities across 15 states. Together these partners combined to host more than 1,000 Harvard Business School students in all.
“We are very excited to be working with Harvard Business School to provide students with a real-world learning experience at our Head Office in Accra,” said Solomon Agbemenya, Head of Business Development. “We are convinced the students were able to gather insights here that they would never be able to glean from a classroom discussion alone.”
The FIELD Immersion is a course designed to strengthen and develop students’ ability to manage and operate effectively in a variety of business contexts. Fido executives had been working with the team remotely in the months leading up to their arrival. While here, the students pitched their ideas to the leadership team, conducted field research with consumers of the Fido products/services and presented their final recommendations to management.
The purpose of this immersive experience is to provide students with the opportunity to ’learn by doing’ through the challenge of introducing a new product, service or customer experience for their Partner company. This requires students to also focus on building contextual intelligence and team effectiveness skills while delivering value in an unfamiliar context.
Harvard is quick to acknowledge that this important learning experience would not be possible without the Project Partners. “We are extremely grateful to Fido and all the FIELD Immersion Project Partner organisations for all they do on behalf of our students,” said Carrie Elkins, Professor of Business Administration and Faculty Chair for the FIELD Immersion. “The students benefit immeasurably from this experience and we hope the partner organisations do as well.”
Fido was founded with a mission to make essential financial services available to the unbanked. Realising that the largest hurdle to financial inclusion is lack of access to credit, the founders set out to solve that problem first. Fido has built a one-of-a-kind credit risk platform that makes instant credit decisions without requiring the customer’s credit history, and has so far disbursed in excess of 2.5 million loans.
