WUNRN
Cellphones for Women in Developing Nations Aid Ascent from Poverty
Ketteline Pierre, a 19-year-old high school student and
street vendor, text-messaging in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, months after the 2010
earthquake. Credit Natasha Fillion/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
By MELINDA GATES – April 1, 2015
Here is what life is like for a woman with no bank account in a developing
country. She keeps her savings hidden — in pots, under mattresses, in fields.
She constantly worries about thieves. She may even worry about her husband
taking cash she has budgeted for their children’s needs. Sending money to a
family member in another village is risky and can take days. Obtaining a loan
in an emergency is often impossible.
An unexpected expense can mean she has to pull a child out of school or
sell a cow the family relies on for income. Or, worse, it can mean she must
give birth at home without medical assistance because she doesn’t have the
money for a ride to a clinic.
In ways big and small, life without access to financial services is more
difficult, expensive and dangerous. It constrains a woman’s ability to plan for
her family’s future. At the community level, it traps households in cycles of
poverty. More broadly, it limits the economic growth potential of developing
countries.
So it is not hard to understand why the spread of new digital financial
services to the world’s poorest places has been heralded as a breakthrough with
the potential to alter the global economy. Digital financial services offer the
world a huge chance to connect more than two billion people to their first bank
accounts, lift millions of families out of poverty and accelerate the
participation of developing countries in the global marketplace.
But this vision of the future won’t materialize on its own. Unless we make
a course correction, it won’t materialize at all. For digital financial
services to achieve their full impact, we must be deliberate about ensuring
that these services are reaching an especially crucial group of economic actors
in developing economies: women.
Even though this technology is spreading rapidly, it is not spreading to
women equally. Consider Bangladesh, where four out of five people do not have
traditional bank accounts. Thanks to fast-growing digital financial services
companies like bKash, mobile money is transforming the way Bangladesh does
business.
Yet only 44 percent of Bangladeshi women own mobile phones, compared with
72 percent of Bangladeshi men. And as a result, only 13 percent of Bangladeshi
women have used mobile money, compared with 33 percent of Bangladeshi men.
This gender gap repeats itself over and over: In low- and middle-income
countries, a woman is 21 percent less likely to own a mobile phone than a man.
In Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, the gap is even greater. And where there is a gap
in access to technology, there is also a gap in the use of financial services.
Women make up half the population. So it is obviously a huge wasted
opportunity whenever women are isolated from the economy. However, when women
are empowered as economic actors, the benefits touch everyone. Economically
empowered women are one of the most important engines of growth in developing
countries, and they play a central role in building prosperous communities.
Women spend money differently from men. They tend to invest more in the
health and well-being of their families — as much as
10 times more. They give priority to spending on health care,
nutritious food and education. A child born in a household where the mother
controls the family budget is 20 percent more likely to survive — and much more likely to
thrive.
When women have access to digital financial services, it is easier for them
to invest in the future of their families. That benefits everyone, because
healthier, more educated children today mean healthier, more prosperous
communities tomorrow.
The GSMA, an association of mobile operators, estimates that closing the
mobile phone gender gap could open a $170
billion market to the mobile industry alone over the next five
years.
So how do we get more of this technology to more women? One thing we need
is more information about why women are less likely to own mobile phones or use
mobile money services.
This month, the World Bank will release the Global Financial Inclusion
Database, or Global Findex, report. This report will provide new insights into
women’s use of digital financial services and help improve our understanding of
how to close the gaps that remain. The Group of 20 industrial nations are also
trying to better understand how digital payments can empower female
entrepreneurs and bring more women into the formal economy.
In the meantime, governments, nonprofit organizations and the private
sector are working together to dismantle the barriers we already know exist —
like committing to digital payroll and social service payments and exploring
creative financing options to help make cellphones more affordable for women.
Mobile money companies are also looking for ways to make their services
more attractive to women. After a Somali mobile money service called Telesom
ZAAD began using female staff members to register female customers, women rose to 24 percent
of the company’s customer base from 17 percent in just one year. More creative
approaches to closing this gap will help this important technological
breakthrough truly break through to everyone. It is here that the technology
industry, as well as the global development sector, should look to invest.
A decade from now, economies in developing countries will be increasingly
dependent on digital financial services. Will we limit growth for everyone by
leaving the world’s poorest women trapped in a shrinking cash economy? Or will
we invest in our future by empowering these women to invest in theirs?