JazzCash Guddi Baji to Connected Women — Iterative Female-Agent Design for Women Micro-Entrepreneurs in Pakistan

Around 2018, approximately 99.9% of JazzCash's roughly 70,000 mobile-money agents in Pakistan were male, and Women's World Banking's research found cultural norms made many women reluctant to transact with male agents, while at the initiative's start only about 7% of Pakistani women held formal financial accounts — a 28-percentage-point gap versus men.
In a first design iteration, JazzCash, Unilever Pakistan and Women's World Banking piloted a female-staffed distribution channel by building on Unilever's existing "Guddi Baji" women's entrepreneur-training network. The 8-month pilot with 32 women entrepreneurs onboarded 566 new JazzCash customers, 42% of them women; participating agents earned an average of $9.40/month in commissions, with top performers earning roughly triple that.
Building on those insights, JazzCash worked with the GSMA Connected Women programme from 2023 to refine an all-female sales team running in-person, group-based onboarding events specifically for women micro-entrepreneurs. By mid-2025, GSMA reported the model had reached 830 women and onboarded 444 to JazzCash's merchant or personal wallet products.
Even after two design iterations, the absolute numbers onboarded (in the hundreds) remain small relative to Pakistan's tens of millions of unbanked women, underlining how large the remaining gap is despite a well-documented, iteratively improved design process.

Read the full analysis: https://www.womensworldbanking.org/insights/the-power-of-partnership-a-corporate-collaboration-to-advance-womens-financial-inclusion-in-pakistan/