Building a critical shared digital infrastructure that paves a pathway for migrants to access urban benefits and financial growth opportunities

Jacob Kohn, Rushil Palavajjhala

Funding Area: Critical shared infrastructure / Infraestructura compartida critica

Problem Statement: In India’s journey of migration-driven urbanization, making it to the city is not the same as making it in the city. Over 200 million people in India migrate multiple times per year in search of better livelihoods. Yet this process is full of blind bets for migrant workers who are often unable to secure a stable job and affordable housing simultaneously; they remain caught in an unpredictable cycle between rural and urban. Their vulnerabilities make them unreliable employees/tenants, and often lead to exploitative arrangements by their employers, contractors and landlords. Migrants are typically confined to informal housing and pay 100 times more than formal city-dwellers for access to longer-term housing tenure. This precludes them and their families from urbanization’s offerings of improved education/healthcare, predictable employment, financial inclusion, and other opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. Securing stable shelter/housing is critical to a migrant’s ability to access urban opportunities and become “documented” - effectively the stepping stone for their success in any destination. MIgrants’ access to technology is stymied by literacy and trust issues. Digital public infrastructure in India has made advances on verification and real-time digital payments, but still lacks critical pieces on “visibilization” that could ease migrants’ transitions from rural to urban, from conflict zones to regions of safety, and from financially limiting to opportunity-rich.

Proposed Activities: Through three years of iterations, we’ve identified housing as the ideal start point to engage with migrants, using repeated touchpoints to build trust while gradually bundling other products/services like employment. We’ve seen rapid digitization of rental housing properties, search behaviors, and migrants’ willingness to pay small amounts for virtual in-app property tours–all shaped by an iterative understanding of customer behaviors and incentives. We wish to continue this specific approach to testing tech-enabled models that would help overcome users’ hesitations and ability to complete larger-sized transactions like paying rent/deposit digitally. Being able to securitize these rental cash flows is critical for financial inclusion, to enable housing upgrades, greater savings for the migrant, and a pathway to urban citizenship. The resources we require will go towards creating infrastructure to help migrants better access and build familiarity with our existing conversational AI offering, driving and measuring gradual transitions to a pure technology approach from our current “physical + digital” approach. We aim to understand the minimum and optimal human-assisted touchpoints to build in our technology. We will build evidence and impact measurement using standardized methodologies for identifying patterns in data and building/testing/deploying machine learning algorithms to expand the platform’s accessibility and make personalized recommendations for migrants. We will require a robust on-ground operations effort to set up human-assisted technology access points at major transport hubs in source and destination areas, requiring wages for our operations personnel. We plan to disburse financial incentives to community members to test and enable behavioral change at scale. We will require subcontracts with our operations partners, and will set up tablets in various office locations as resource points for on-ground centers and teams. We will require resources to carry out awareness campaigns, market our solution at key landing points for migrants, and to enable local and regional travel for partnership-building. Finally, we will maintain and iterate on our technology platform with our team of 4 front-end and back-end developers, requiring associated wages and maintenance costs. We aim to impact 100,000 people over 18 months in the geographies of Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore (India). We anticipate working with a variety of stakeholders, including large corporations employing these workers, International Labour Organization; governments (federal, state, district, municipal); multilaterals; local NGOs and CSCs; and local industry associations and housing finance companies.

Openness: Our stack and model would be open-source, and could be applied in a variety of global contexts which are solving for migrants, refugees, and other vulnerable/temporary communities seeking stability. We have already begun conversations with groups doing similar work in Kenya, Cambodia, and the Philippines, where affordable rental housing and financial inclusion are also key challenges in migrants’ journeys. We intend to continue sharing our insights at a high level in various reports for large NGOs and public forums (including conference and university settings). We will also continue collaborating with academia to publish journal articles and blog posts on this topic. Regarding technology, we are designing processes that align with open-source protocols (i.e. Beckn) for financial inclusion, and are partnering with groups that enable and scale these channels. We are committed under an agreement with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a limited license to distribute our product and to ensure that we do not place financial burdens or barriers on those most vulnerable in our platform; our privacy policy is guided by this principle.

Challenges: Users trusting our technology and requiring less human intervention in the process is a transition that could take longer than expected and require more human intervention points. There may be a high churn rate because of continued low digital literacy and mistrust of digital solutions. Users may fear cyber-fraud and losing their savings, may lack consistent smartphone access and/or data storage capacity, or may be generally reluctant to change their traditional ways of searching for housing. Over-reliance on third-party LLMs, which lack suitable trained models on local dialects and accents. Middlemen who have long benefited from being gatekeepers to information and fair pricing could try to disrupt our interventions.

Neglectedness: In the impact investing space, there is both limited capacity in terms of funding this solution and limited innovation in terms of supporting solutions specifically targeted at affordable housing and financial inclusion for migrants. Agency Fund and Village Capital are the only groups in this area we are aware of, who have a thesis around migration. We were one of the top 30 groups considered for Agency Fund research in April 2023. We were selected as one of 32 startups for Village Capital’s Financial Solutions for Migrants accelerator in spring 2023, and are currently in funding discussions with them. We have been supported by OpenNyAI and Microsoft Research to build out AI-enabled technology solutions for this type of work, and are a member of the Microsoft for Startup Founders program.

Success: Our digital products (smartphone app and Voice AI-enabled WhatsApp bot) have automated real-time passive measurement and live learning models on various user behaviors. The technology allows us to rapidly design and test interventions in two-to-three-week-long learning cycles, with weighted attribute testing. We passively measure and learn from various user behaviors. Our north star metric is the value of savings to a migrant worker due to our intervention. This includes savings attributed to better wages, cheaper rental homes, minimal search and transaction costs, and time costs. We collect time series data on migrants’ journeys using our solution, with a pre- and post-intervention understanding of- At Source: Location of first access; opportunities searched; geographies and wage levels sought; criteria used and time to take a decision; trade-offs considered. At Destination: Information sought upon arrival; ability to seek better opportunities; commuting and rent burdens; net financial gain/loss; length of stay. Migrants trusting the digital process: Measuring/observing an increase in clicks for searching affordable rental housing. Increase in percentage of digital search processes that convert into fully digital transactions for rent/deposits. Increase in women micro-entrepreneur incomes and task outcomes - based on their enrollment and income increases.

Total Budget: 25000

Affiliations: Bandhu (Bandhu Tech Inc., the US parent company, and Bandhu Urban Technologies India Pvt Ltd., the India-based operations company)

LMIE Carveout: Our project would take place in low-income urban settlements in Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore (India) and is aimed at individuals and communities living in (or migrating to) these areas. Bandhu as an organization has a strong and trusted presence in Ahmedabad, and is building a larger community network in Pune, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Our team members are based in India (Mumbai and Ahmedabad), and Bandhu has been working in India for the past 3.5 years.

Team Skills: Our founding team are all MIT alumni. Rushil Palavajjhala (Co-founder, CEO) has worked as an architect/project manager in construction in India and also worked for two years implementing affordable housing under the PMAY (Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana) government policy to house 6 million people across 5 cities, where he identified migrants’ difficulties in accessing housing. At MIT he specialized in real estate finance and geospatial data science. Jacob Kohn (Co-founder, COO), a US native, has spent over five years living and working in rural/urban India. A former management consultant, he uses his skills in process management, UI/UX design and data science to lead the tech team and mapping and analytics systems - integral to Bandhu’s rapid learning and iteration process. Darsh Shah (Co-founder) is a Mumbai native with a PhD in AI from MIT, and a former AI research scientist at Meta. He specializes in NLPs and image processing, enabling Bandhu to tailor its platform to individual migrant needs. Our field team is exclusively hired from the communities we work in - with a lived experience of the problem. Our team members have worked with the state labour departments and on affordable housing field research. We have a longstanding partnership with Aajeevika Bureau, one of India’s largest migrant-focused NGOs.

How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)

Submission Number: 92