The team was challenged to measure whether World Vision's goal of increasing financial literacy among savings group members is being achieved.
Until Dandreb Dizon (MBA '25) came to the University of Notre Dame for his MBA, he lived the first 25 years of his life in the Philippines. Yet, when the aspiring consultant was assigned to the 2024 Business on the Frontlines' Team Philippines, he saw his home country with fresh eyes.
"I am a product of the public school system in the Philippines and government funding has supported my entire education," Dizon said. Though he initially regarded his participation on Team Frontlines as a way to give back, he ultimately took away just as much as he invested.
Several times since 2016 Frontlines has partnered with the Philippines-based World Vision Development Foundation (WVDF), a global Christian humanitarian organization working to improve the lives of children, their families and their communities. This team was tasked with evaluating the long-term impact of the WVDF Community-Managed Savings and Credit Association (CoMSCA ), a wide-reaching program currently active in more than 20 provinces. It serves "unbanked" people, individuals mainly from rural regions who might not have access to traditional bank products such as savings and loans.
"Essentially, unbanked Filipinos form a group for shared savings, and when they need money, each member has the privilege of borrowing from the pool,” said Dizon. “As a result, they gain a loan within their trusted group, filling the gap from not having access or qualifications to borrow from financial institutions."
Vanessa Retuerma, director of strategy management, impact and learning at WVDF, heads up the country office's research unit and has served as Frontlines' main point of contact on the ground since the partnership launched.
"In the Philippines, we are a spending culture and we don't have a strong saving and investing mindset. CoMSCA aims to strengthen the capacity for individuals and communities to be able to manage their own finances," she said.
Over the past decade, CoMSCA has flourished as a financial institution. It currently serves more than 200,000 Filipino citizens who lean on it primarily to launch small family businesses or recover from natural disasters. WVDF challenged Team Philippines to measure whether its goal of increasing financial literacy among CoMSCA members is being achieved.
In addition to understanding the program's reach, Team Philippines was tasked with assessing how WVDF can scale up and innovate the popular program.
Before the team touched down in-country, they held weekly planning calls with WVDF for several months and conducted intensive desk research and online interviews with beneficiaries. "Two weeks in the field is very limiting, but because of all this preparation, their time in-country became about filling their knowledge gaps with field research," Retuerma said.
Since it wasn't logistically possible or safe to visit all 20 provinces in which the program operates, WVP arranged visits to 10 barangays (small administrative districts) in the provinces of Leyte and Samar. There, they conducted 15 interviews with CoMSCA stakeholders, focusing on collecting stories and other forms of qualitative data.
From these interviews, Team Philippines learned that CoMSCA is highly effective at alleviating rural poverty, promoting community resilience and offering members crucial financial literacy and practical business experience. They also provided WVP with recommendations for improving the consistency of programming across provinces and helping members achieve more ambitious goals.
For example, from the interviews, Team Philippines learned that existing CoMSCA loans are capped at 20,000 pesos, the equivalent of around $340. "You can only do so much with that — and it's not scalable," Retuerma said. Recognizing the limitations, the team recommended an alternative compensation system for qualifying members who could prove that it would be within their capacity to repay a bigger loan and that their business models were sustainable in nature.
"These outside-the-box ideas added value to what we do on the ground. What's really amazing about this partnership is that we complement one another's strengths," Retuerma shared. WVDF brings programmatic knowledge of the communities in which the program is implemented as well as industry expertise on humanitarian development work, while each Frontlines cohort contributes fresh perspectives from Notre Dame. "It's this expertise in academic research and also experience in business, marketing and finance in solving social problems that is so important,” she said.
The rural agricultural provinces were as unfamiliar to Dizon, a Manila native, as they were to his teammates. What he saw on the ground regarding the need for rural communities to receive even more investment from major companies gave him tremendous pause.
"The overall Frontlines experience helped me to solidify my stance on the role of business in creating a more equitable society,” Dizon said. Companies, he’s now convinced, are responsible for pushing beyond just generating profit for shareholders. "They have to invest in giving back to society too. While these kinds of investments may not generate revenue, the impact is in helping to solve social injustices."