FINANCE & E-COMMERCE
Designing a financial empowerment app for Ghanaian women entrepreneurs.
A case study on how we designed AWE; a financial tracking and goal-setting app designed to empower Ghanaian women entrepreneurs by providing intuitive tools to monitor profits, track expenses, generate reports, and set business goals, enabling long-term business growth and sustainability.
Timeline
8 weeks
Background
Women entrepreneurs in Ghana face significant challenges in managing their finances, limiting their ability to grow and sustain their businesses. To address this, the US Embassy and USAID collaborated to develop the AWE Academy, an initiative equipping women with the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. However, after completing the program, many graduates struggled with financial visibility, tracking business growth, and accessing the right financial tools.
Through research and conversations with Ghanaian women entrepreneurs, we uncovered three key financial pain points:
Lack of Financial Clarity – Many women lacked a clear understanding of their profits, expenses, and overall business performance.
Limited Access to Reporting Tools – Traditional banking systems did not provide tailored financial tracking solutions to meet their specific needs.
Difficulty in Setting and Tracking Financial Goals – Without structured goal-setting frameworks, entrepreneurs found it challenging to plan and measure their financial progress.
To bridge this gap, we designed AWE, a financial tracking and goal-setting app tailored for women entrepreneurs in Ghana. The app provides an intuitive platform for monitoring profits, tracking expenses and transactions, generating financial reports, and setting business goals. By equipping these women with the right tools, AWE empowers them to take control of their finances and build sustainable, thriving businesses.
This category details the step-by-step approach taken during the project, including research, planning, design, development, testing, and optimization phases.
Research & Planning
We conducted interviews and surveys with 50+ Ghanaian women entrepreneurs to gain insight into their financial challenges and daily workflows. Our research focused on understanding how they track expenses, plan for business growth, and monitor financial progress. We discovered that many rely on manual methods like notebooks or basic spreadsheets, leading to inefficiencies and a lack of financial clarity. From this data, we developed a user persona that encapsulates the common pain points, behaviors, and goals of these entrepreneurs, ensuring our solution directly addresses their needs.
Key Insights from Research
Manual & Inefficient Tracking: The majority of women entrepreneurs relied on notebooks or basic spreadsheets to track expenses, leading to errors, inefficiencies, and difficulty in assessing their financial health.
Limited Visibility into Business Growth: Many struggled to monitor profits and losses effectively, making it challenging to make informed business decisions or secure funding from banks.
Lack of Goal-Setting Frameworks: Entrepreneurs lacked structured tools to set and track financial goals, making long-term planning and sustainable business growth difficult.
These insights shaped our user persona, ensuring the AWE app directly addresses these pain points with tailored financial tracking and goal-setting solutions.
Design & Prototyping
To ensure our solution effectively addressed the needs of Ghanaian women entrepreneurs, I collaborated closely with a local engineer and product manager to brainstorm and develop user-friendly financial tracking solutions. Our goal was to create an intuitive and accessible experience, given that many users were not tech-savvy.
We focused on simplicity and clarity, stripping away unnecessary complexity to ensure the app did exactly what it promised—track expenses, monitor profits, and set financial goals without overwhelming features. Through rapid prototyping and iterative feedback sessions, we refined key workflows to ensure effortless navigation and usability.
Key design decisions included:
Minimalist, clutter-free UI with clear navigation and straightforward actions.
Guided onboarding flow to help users get started quickly with minimal instruction.
Automated expense tracking & goal-setting prompts to reduce manual input and improve engagement.
By prioritizing usability and function over fluff, we designed a solution that empowers women entrepreneurs to confidently manage their finances without feeling intimidated by technology.
Implementation
We leveraged agile development methodologies to build the AWE financial tracking app from the ground up, ensuring continuous iteration based on user feedback. Working closely with our local engineer and product manager, we prioritized feature development to align with the most critical needs of Ghanaian women entrepreneurs.
Key implementation highlights:
Streamlined expense tracking by integrating automated categorization to reduce manual input.
Optimized goal-setting workflows to provide clear, step-by-step guidance for financial planning.
Lightweight, mobile-friendly design to ensure accessibility, even in areas with limited connectivity.
By focusing on usability and technical feasibility, we delivered an intuitive, reliable, and impactful tool that empowers women entrepreneurs to take control of their finances with confidence.
The resulting AI-powered scheduling app offers a seamless user experience, allowing individuals and businesses to effortlessly manage their schedules.
Here, the outcomes and achievements of the project are highlighted, including user feedback and adoption rates.
Enhanced financial clarity Efficiency
85% users reported increased clarity in tracking their business profits and expenses.
Positive User Feedback
80% found goal-setting easier, leading to more structured business growth plans.
Growing User Base