From the show floor at Mobile World Congress, Visa’s Head of Corporate Responsibility, Douglas Sabo interviews thought leaders from the public, private and NGO sectors about the impact mobile services are having on financial inclusion efforts around the world.
Next in the series, Douglas sits down with Daryl Collins, Author of Portfolios of the Poor and Director at Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) for an extended discussion of the research recently released BFA, the GSMA mWomen Programme and Visa Inc. exploring how women around the world manage their money and how mobile money services can help meet their financial needs.
Among her insights, Daryl shares information about how the money management techniques of women differ from men and the importance of the income that women earn and contribute to family expenses. Daryl shared additional information from the study, including what women reported as the most appealing features of mobile financial services: convenience, security and privacy.
Daryl Collins, Author of Portfolios of the Poor and Director at Bankable Frontier Associates
Women actively contribute to household income. Seventy-five percent of women surveyed contribute some amount of income, most often from irregular sources like small businesses or agricultural sales.
Women use a variety of tools to manage household finances. Nearly 60 percent of women surveyed are saving money for daily expenses and long-term needs, and a full one-third pay the family’s utility bills or make other types of remittances.
Women recognize the security and privacy of mobile money. In Kenya, for example, 95 percent of women using mobile remittances rated them as secure and private. In comparison, only half of those using personal delivery of cash as their primary method consider it secure and private.
Additionally, the study identifies actionable next steps for mobile financial service providers that want to expand their business to reach this untapped market, including: increasing mobile access for women; providing better financial literacy services to encourage awareness and understanding; delivering high-quality customer service; and developing targeted solutions to existing barriers faced by women in these markets.
This effort is part of Visa’s ongoing efforts to advance financial inclusion in the developing world. Given that women make up a majority of the 2.5 billion adults who lack access to formal financial products, this report has particular significance for these efforts. We look forward to continuing to work with our partners to bring more underserved women into the financial mainstream, thereby reducing the cycle of poverty throughout the world.
Next week, Visa, the GSMA mWomen Programme and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) will release research that explores the opportunities for mobile financial services (MFS) to better serve the financial lives of women in developing countries. In advance of the formal report, we sat down with BFA’s research team to learn more about their hands-on experiences in the five countries covered in the report: Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Tanzania. We’ve shared their stories over the past few weeks in a blog and video series that showcases women’s experiences with mobile money.
The full series, featured on Mobile Payments Today, is worth checking out. It includes:
The official launch of our study, Unlocking the Potential: Women and Mobile Financial Services in Emerging Markets, will take place during Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Spain on February 26th. Aletha Ling, Chief Operating Officer of Fundamo, a Visa company, will discuss the findings during a panel featuring mobile money experts Roar Bjaerum, Head of Easypaisa, Telenor Pakistan and USAID Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Maura O’Neill. The seminar will be keynoted by Cherie Blair, Founder of The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women.
The report will be available via GSMA and Visa, and will reveal the combined findings featured in this series of stories from the field. We look forward to sharing it with you.
In advance of the release of the ground-breaking research between Visa, the GSMA mWomen Programme and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) that explores the role of mobile financial services for women in developing countries, we sat down with BFA Associate Kristy Bohling to discuss her experiences conducting fieldwork for the study in Tanzania.
Kristy explored the lifestyles of mobile money users and non-users, assessing the barriers that still exist for underserved women in Tanzania, and exploring opportunities for empowering more women to use mobile financial services.
Watch Kristy share her in-field experience in this video interview. Kristy also shares her experiences in a guest contribution on Mobile Payments Today , the second in a five-part seriesexploring mobile financial services in developing economies.
Today, half the world’s adult population (2.5 billion) lacks access to basic financial services – the majority of which are women.[1] With the rapid spread of cell phones, mobile financial services offer a unique opportunity to help close this gender gap.
At Visa we’re working with banks, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide the financially underserved with secure, reliable and affordable financial services at scale. To that end, Visa has partnered with GSMA’s mWomen Programme (GSMA) and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) to understand the wants and needs of women for mobile financial services in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and Tanzania.
Mobile technology in the hands of women can provide access to life-enhancing services, but studies have shown that there is a demonstrated gender gap in mobile phone ownership and usage. In Pakistan, for example, only 12 percent of the total population has a bank account, and those who do are primarily men. In contrast, mobile phone usage hovers around 70 percent. This research will identify how to bridge that gap – connecting women to the mobile financial services they desperately need to enter the financial mainstream.
To learn more about women’s banking experiences in Pakistan, watch this video from the field and visit Mobile Payments Today for a guest contribution from Fundamo’s Aletha Ling and GSMA’s Chris Locke.
To read more about Visa’s commitment to financial inclusion and its mission to be the best way to pay and be paid, for everyone, everywhere click here.
[1] Half the World is Unbanked, Financial Access Initiative
The GSMA mWomen Programme, a partnership between USAID, AusAID the GSMA and Visa, has recently launched the GSMA mWomen Design Challenge http://designchallenge.mwomen.org/, sponsored by Qtel Group. This is a competition seeking creative solutions for making the smartphone user experience more intuitive for technically illiterate users, particularly women, in developing countries. Julia Burchell, GSMA mWomen Knowledge Manager, discusses the context for the challenge and the impacts it could have for the mobile industry and for resource poor women around the world.
Mobile as a testament to human ingenuity
Mobile phone use in the developing world is exploding, yet women risk being left behind. 21% fewer women than men own a mobile phone in low- to middle-income countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap is estimated to be 23%; in the Middle East, 24% and in South Asia it rises to 37%.
The result is a mobile phone gender gap estimated to be 300 million women in the developing world without access to this potentially life-enhancing tool. And this tool is a powerful one. GSMA research, conducted in partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, has shown there is a range of benefits associated with women’s mobile ownership: 93% of women surveyed felt more connected to family and friends, 85% felt more independent and 41% said owning a phone had improved their ability to make money. Mobile phones also can be used to help manage money, and for many unbanked people in emerging markets, mobile money services offer the first step to financial inclusion.
However, a range of barriers stand in women’s way of realising these benefits, including cultural barriers, a high total cost of mobile ownership (which includes device cost, airtime top-up and charging) and a lack of basic and technical literacy.
These barriers are not insurmountable. For example, it is possible to use a mobile phone, despite the inability to read or write; millions across the world do every day, including some resource-poor women. As our recent study, “Striving & Surviving” demonstrated, women take advantage of the “proximate literacy” of their family and friends, and many teach themselves through trial and error. The ability of people under such constraints to use a tool designed for users with greater resources at their disposal is testimony to both human ingenuity and the great value the tool adds to their daily lives.
The GSMA mWomen Programme aims to promote improved mobile ownership and usage by resource-poor women in emerging markets by 2014. We aim to help bring precisely those kinds of life-enhancing mobile services that many women currently lack, such as health information, mobile money and better connection to family and friends, into the hands of women across the developing world.
Phones getting smarter
The phones discussed in our study were feature phones, the most common in developing markets, with basic voice and SMS capabilities. These feature phones were originally designed to meet the needs of those that could afford them: urban, literate males with incomes that could support the costs of the device and its continued use, including airtime top-up and battery charging.
Over time, however, the standard feature phone will face competition from the richer experience available on smartphones. The price of smartphone devices is dropping, and usage of smartphones is increasing across the world. Smartphones are now available for as little as US$80 in Kenya and other countries, and these prices continue to drop. Strategy Analytics projects that smartphones will gain in share at a rapid pace in emerging markets. In India, the organization projects that the pace will increase by 856% between 2011 and 2016, and by 239% in Indonesia over the same period.
People across the developing world will find ways to use smartphones to meet their needs, whatever their resource and skill levels. Given that women make up the majority of the world’s poor, illiterate and unempowered population, they are unlikely to be the first adopters of these technologies. While the devices eventually will become the standard, particularly given the upswell of second-hand mobile devices entering these markets, the women currently underserved by mobile risk falling further behind.
Here at the GSMA mWomen Programme we’re asking, what if smartphones were designed to meet the needs of low-literacy women? What if the tools were geared towards serving the needs of those with limited disposable incomes and access to power? What if we could improve the smartphone user experience now to prevent resource-poor women from continuing to miss out in the future?
Women & mobile: the smart choice
To help answer these questions, we were very excited to launch the GSMA mWomen Design Challenge at the recent Social Good Summit in New York. The competition seeks to engage the global digital design community to create solutions to make the smartphone user experience more intuitive, particularly for women in developing countries who struggle with technical literacy. Entries can be submitted until 14 December, 2012, and the winners, who will be announced in February in Barcelona at GSMA’s Mobile World Congress, will receive prizes up to US$20,000. The winners also will have the opportunity to speak with potential investors interested in commercializing strong innovations.
So, we are calling on you and your networks, be they programmers and product designers or entrepreneurs and innovators, to help redefine the smartphone user experience for resource poor women. Check out the challenge at http://designchallenge.mwomen.org/ today!
Continuing the series of perspectives from the recent Better Than Cash launch event in New York City, the next interviews highlight two organizations that clearly understand the value of moving towards electronic payments: the GSMA and Women’s World Banking.
GSMA Mobile for Development brings together their mobile operator members, the wider mobile industry and the development community to drive commercial mobile services for underserved people in emerging markets.
Women’s World Banking is the only microfinance network with an explicit focus on women. Their network of 39 financial organizations from 27 countries—also known as microfinance institutions—located around the world provide small loans, sometimes as modest as $100, to people to start their businesses.
Chris Locke, Managing Director, GSMA Mobile for Development
Today, Visa’s Chairman and CEO, Joe Saunders, joined with the President and CEO of Women’s World Banking to announce that our two organizations are partnering to advance financial inclusion for women in Nigeria. As part of the announcement, they shared their perspectives in an editorial in the Huffington Post about how financial inclusion can help transform the lives of women in emerging markets.
Nearly 2.5 billion people – almost half the world’s adult population – do not have access to formal financial services. Without basic payments and savings accounts, money often is kept in cash under the mattress then moved around from person to person, drastically increasing the risk of theft or loss. Even a task as simple as paying a bill – in person and via cash – can be unsafe, costly and time-consuming. The implications of this financial exclusion are significant and far-reaching, reinforcing the cycle of poverty and slowing economic progress.
In emerging economies around the world, this can be a particular challenge for women. In Nigeria, for example, nearly 77 percent of women lack access to financial services. Yet, they often serve as the primary financial managers in most families, expected to stretch meager and irregular incomes to meet daily household needs, not to mention long-term budgeting for life’s unexpected shocks.
The initiative in Nigeria that was announced today will help provide women there with an opportunity to become economically and socially empowered through access to a savings account.
Visa is proud to join a new partnership to improve the lives of women in developing countries. Announced today, the GSMA mWomen Global Development Alliance brings Visa together with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and GSMA Foundation in a partnership to close the gender gap in access to mobile phones and the life-enhancing services they can provide. The partnership’s goals include reducing the mobile phone gender gap by 50% and enabling an additional 150 million underserved women in developing countries to own and effectively use mobile phones and their services, including mobile financial services.
Today, half the world’s adult population—2.5 billion people—lacks access to basic financial services. An estimated 70% of the financially underserved are women. Being financially excluded means relying on cash, where a simple task like paying a bill or receiving money from a family member can be risky, costly and time consuming. Financial exclusion also reinforces the cycle of poverty and slows economic growth. And women in developing economies often bear the greater burden of these impacts.
Mobile technology already is demonstrating the potential to change that. By 2012, 1.7 billion people are expected to own a mobile phone but will not have a bank account. Around the world, we already have begun to see the power that mobile technology can have in extending the reach of digital currency, providing the unbanked with tools for payments and other life-enhancing financial services and bringing new participants into the global financial system. This is, in part, why Visa has been investing in mobile, including our recent acquisition of Fundamo and the launch a new product tailored to the needs of consumers in developing countries— a prepaid account that can be accessed through a simple menu on a mobile phone.
Yet, while mobile financial services offer an unparalleled opportunity to advance financial inclusion, there is a global gender gap in mobile phone ownership and usage, with women 21 percent less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. The only way mobile will help improve the lives of women at the base of the pyramid is if we work to close the mobile phone gender gap.
The partnership announced today further strengthens our commitment to advancing financial inclusion not only through product innovation, but also by partnering with some of the world’s leading organizations to better understand the challenges of the financially underserved, share our payments expertise and support programs that deliver basic financial services. We look forward to sharing developments from this partnership as it progresses.
For more information and the official press release, click here.
