Connecting rural unserved 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 connecting rural, unserved communities to markets for retail DFS 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. What are the broader impacts of connecting unserved communities with retail DFS?
2. Once connected, could letting consumers evaluate their retailers improve the quality of services, consumer usage, and business outcomes, and if so, how?