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> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
The majority of individuals around the world without formal bank accounts are women. In the developing world, 63 percent of women lack accounts, versus 54 percent of men. Mobile financial services offer a path to inclusion given that 1.7 of the 2.5 billion unbanked own mobile phones. However, the path is longer for women, as the majority of mobile phone owners are men.
Visa, mWomen, and Bankable Frontier Associates are working together to bring mobile services to women. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona they’re releasing joint research that examines how to best design mobile financial services to reach women at the base of the pyramid (BoP), Unlocking the Potential: Women and Mobile Financial Services in Emerging Markets.
You might remember our posting about mWomen research on mobile phone usage among BoP women earlier this year. The previous report, Striving and Surviving: Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid, cast light on the opportunity for mobile money services to benefit BoP women. This potential was evidenced in the report’s findings that BoP women are largely responsible for managing their family’s finances, that they often go to unsafe, costly, and time-consuming lengths to do so, and that one of the biggest barriers preventing their use of formal financial services is a lack of nearby facilities.
Unlocking the Potential builds off Striving and Surviving to establish where the developing world is with mobile financial services among BoP women. Over the past few months the research team has worked with women in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and Tanzania to better understand their relationship with mobile financial services, examining how they manage their money, what their needs are, and how mobile financial services can fit into their lives.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
Buzz about the promise of mobile money services has been around for some time now (see our previous blog posts on the subject here, here, and here), but until coming across a recently released report from mWomen, I’d never found anything highlighting the especially big opportunity that mobile money presents for lower-income women.
mWomen’s report Striving and Surviving: Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid examines the relationship between mobile phones and women, and in doing so articulates how exceedingly well-positioned this client segment is to benefit from mobile money services. mWomen is a program of GSMA that brings together the worldwide mobile industry and the global development community to reduce the mobile phone gender gap by 50 percent by 2014, facilitating connectivity to more than 150 million women in emerging markets.
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