Case study · 9 min read
Listening before lending: what a livelihood cohort taught us
The revolving fund worked. The graduation ceremony did not. Here is what we changed.
By Amol Verma · January 2026
In 2023 we ran our first revolving fund — ₹8 lakh, disbursed as micro-loans of ₹5,000 to ₹25,000, no collateral, only a co-signature from two other cohort members.
Eighteen months later, repayment is at 94% and default is concentrated in one specific pattern: women whose husbands had lost work in the same quarter. That is not a credit problem; it is a household-cashflow problem, and we should have designed for it.
We changed three things in the 2025 round. First, every loan now comes with a compulsory 10% held aside as a household buffer, released only on a shock event. Second, we run a partner-conversation session before disbursal — not to gate the loan, but to make the money visible to the household. Third, we stopped calling it 'graduation'. The cohort continues, informally, for as long as the women want it to.
The lesson is simple and old: the design of a financial product is the design of a relationship. If the relationship is honest about who else is in the room, the product is more forgiving.