Create a Micro-Pension Product for Market Women Tied to Their Church Cooperative

Inside most Yoruba, Igbo, and Efik-speaking Pentecostal and Catholic congregations you will find a women's cooperative: an ajo or esusu-style thrift group that meets weekly, collects contributions, and rotates lump sums to members. These groups have been running for decades with near-perfect collection rates. They work because the church provides social enforcement, trust, and a reason to show up every Sunday. But the money cycles back out to individual members and disappears into school fees, rent, or petty trading capital. Nothing accumulates. Your task is to design a micro-pension product that layers onto existing church cooperative structures. The product should allow market women aged 25 to 55 to commit a fixed weekly amount, matched or held in trust by their cooperative, into a long-term savings vehicle that they cannot easily access until retirement age. You are not building the financial infrastructure from scratch. You are designing around real products that already exist: PenCom-registered micro-pension schemes, mobile money platforms like Opay or Moniepoint, and cooperative bylaws. Deliver a business model canvas and a one-page product explainer written for a semi-literate market woman in Lagos or Aba. The business model canvas should address: the value proposition to the woman and to the cooperative leadership; the revenue model (does anyone take a fee, and who covers administrative costs); the risk of early withdrawal; and how the product handles a member who dies before retirement. The one-pager should be in plain English and Pidgin, no jargon. Good work will show that you have read the National Pension Commission micro-pension framework. It will price the product honestly, acknowledge the competition from more liquid savings options, and explain why a woman who can withdraw from her ajo whenever she needs to would voluntarily lock money away instead.