Well. Once again I don’t have Internet. But this time, I’m sitting on a plane back to the States. Lufthansa apparently now offers wi-fi on their flights. But let’s be real; as a graduate student, I’m at the bottom of the academic ecosystem: the vulture. The next time you attend a talk, look around and I’m sure you will notice a hungry grad student lurking in the shadows waiting for everyone else to finish their pickings before they swarm in for their share. Admittedly, I even belong to a listserv called vultures@mit, where they email out free food in Stata. Disclaimer: chances are if you’re not on site within five minutes of the posting, the food is already gone.
In any case, onto project Bluelight! One by one, our team members are leaving Jordan; however, we have set up a few things to run in our absence over the next few months.
As I previously mentioned MOPIC will be conducting a survey of ~500-1000 people so that we can better understand our potential customers current savings and purchasing habits. In addition, we have hired a country manager to oversee all operations in our absence. But most importantly of all… we have set up our pilot! In addition to the survey, MOPIC will also be running focus groups to educate people about our product and to have them enroll into the pilot! The pilot will run for the next three to four months and subjects will have the option to save up for either 40 JD or 80 JD Safeway gift cards. They will essentially purchase 5 JD Bluecards from loan officers and text in the six-digit code on the cards to the designated Bluelight number. We also spent some time in the field meeting with potential costumers. Everyone seems excited about the notion, the only issue that we consistently came across was that of trust. Hopefully our partnership with Ahli Microfinance and Safeway will have addressed a bit of that. We are all super excited to have our first subject!
Check out that was placed in the Ahli local branch. Â The boxes contain the printed BlueCards. Pretty professional, eh?
