THE CHALLENGE: The Nigeria for Women Project, supported by the World Bank, pays grants to women's affinity groups, many of them in rural communities a long way from a bank branch. Paying in cash is slow, expensive and hard to account for: it needs people to travel, it leaves a thin paper trail, and every step between the budget and the beneficiary is a step where money can go astray.

WHAT WE BUILT: The project adopted I-PIN, built on dev1kit (ODK), as its project management system - registration of members and groups, the record of who is entitled to what, and the electronic disbursement of grants against that record.

HOW IT WORKS

• Women and their affinity groups are registered once, with their details held centrally

• Entitlement is derived from the register rather than from a separate list

• Grants are disbursed electronically, each payment tied to the beneficiary record it belongs to

• Progress is reported by state and local government, for the programme and for its funder

THE OUTCOME: Over 300,000 individuals were registered, and grants were disbursed electronically - the first World Bank-supported project in Nigeria to pay its grants that way. The approach has since been carried into other programmes.