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.

A big takeaway from the research is how consistently overlooked and important women are as a potentially large and active client segment for mobile money services. Indeed women are often the family members who conduct the financial transactions, including paying bills, sending and receiving remittances, storing money, and handling government-to-person payments (G2P).

To a great degree, designing mobile money services to fit the needs of BoP women involves the core principles of good mobile money services generally. The researchers found that across all five studied countries, women expressed the importance of four attributes: convenience, reliability, security, and privacy. Given that they often experience daunting daily schedules and economic shocks, women are interested in services whose performance matches their need for dependability and their risk-aversion. Offering services with these characteristics will not only earn the business of more BoP women, it will likely earn more business throughout the entire market.

The report lists a number of specific industry-wide developments needed to fully realize the potential of the women’s segment:

• Get women to try the services for the first time. A significant portion of individuals studied were aware of mobile money services, but they hadn’t actually tried them. Those who had tried them tended to adopt them for regular use. The researchers suggest incentive schemes and education programs to encourage first time trials.
• Streamline registration. A common problem voiced in the research was the lack of necessary personal identification for the enrollment of services.
• Extend access and improve branding of agents. Quite possibility the biggest barrier to the wide-adoption of mobile money services by BoP women is the availability and reliability of agents. As the “front-line” to service engagement and use, and with BoP women’s common need to stay close to their children and their home, it’s essential that mobile money services adequately extend agent networks.

In addition to the launch of Unlocking the Potential, there are many other exciting events happening at this year’s Mobile World Congress. One such event is a session tonight hosted by Visa and frog. Everyone, Everywhere: How Visa Inc. Will Reach the Next Billion will discuss how to create a sustainable innovation model for understanding consumers and building market share in the developing world, based on their recent work in Rwanda.

Image credit: Visa, mWomen, Bankable Frontier Associates

Have you read? 

Catch and Release – Checking in on Recent Mobile Money Happenings

Mobile Money Could Mean Big Benefits for Lower-Income Women

Our Woman in Milan: Observations on the Intersection of Mobile Money and Regulation

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.

The researchers behind the mWomen report found that women in families at the base of the pyramid are largely responsible for managing their household’s finances (a collective 2,500+ women from Egypt, India, Papua New Guinea, and Uganda took part in the project’s research). And with low and often unpredictable incomes, this is no simple task. Household financial management strategies used by the women surveyed regularly include: hiding money within the home away from other family members (especially husbands); storing money at the homes of family or friends, enabling outside parties to act as “money guards;” borrowing from family or friends during emergencies; and accumulating savings in gold jewelry or coins.

Though more formal financial services do exist – some research respondents cited the possibility of participating in microfinance services – many of the women reported a lack of local banks as a major challenge. This infrastructural deficiency not only leads to increased time spent traveling to banks, but also higher safety risks. Crime is often high in areas of high unemployment and poverty, and women are often targets in the case of attacks. Of the research respondents, 8 percent listed safety and security as one of their life’s most pressing challenges.

The report doesn’t detail how mobile money services might be tailored to best fit the specific needs of BoP women, it suggests possible avenues for exploration only in general terms, like using the platform for simple budgeting, mobile banking, or access to microcredit. The report does, on the other hand, go into depth on how BoP women perceive mobile phone use and explore barriers to adoption, both of mobile phones and of mobile money. Here’s a look at some of the biggest barriers:

• Cost: 81 percent of women who reported not wanting to own a mobile phone cited cost as a principle reason.
• Husband suspicion: 64 percent of married respondents who did not want a mobile phone cited disapproval from their husbands. 82 percent of married respondents who own a mobile phone reported the ownership disadvantage of it making their husband suspicious.
• Family social dynamics: In some of the surveyed markets, a family could need to have three or more mobile phones before it would be perceived as sensible for a woman in the family to have one. In India and Egypt, after the patriarch, sons, brothers, or brothers-in-law tend to be “next in line” to receive a phone before women.
• Technical literacy: 22 percent of those who reported not wanting to own a mobile phone said the main reason was that they wouldn’t know how to use it.
• Perceived value of SMS messaging: Respondents reported that they didn’t see SMS services as useful. Despite 77 percent of respondents having made a mobile phone call, only 37 percent had sent an SMS message.

However, these barriers aren’t insurmountable and the report outlines ways to overcome them and reach BoP women. Driving prices down surely will be important in encouraging sustainable adoption, but there are other areas that need to be explored as well.

The report emphasizes that working with the communication channels used by BoP women could be an effective way of combating unfamiliarity, misconceptions, and inequitable social dynamics. 53 percent of the women surveyed watch television, often daily, and 28 percent of respondents reported visiting women’s groups regularly. And if the producers of such pro-mobile messaging need compelling material, this very report from mWomen would be a good place to start. Here’s a few of my favorite statistics from the report:

• “I wish I could save my own money” was the #1 ranked of 40 attitudinal statements in Uganda and Papua New Guinea
• 41 percent of respondents reported that owning a mobile phone helped them increase their income or their professional prospects
• 73 percent of BoP women expressed interest in entrepreneurship
• 80 percent of respondents reporting being more connected to family and friends as a benefit of mobile phones
• 93 percent of BoP women reported that mobile phones made them feel safer

To access the full report, and to learn about the project’s research methods, visit the mWomen website.

Image credit: mWomen

Have you read?

Our Woman in Milan: Observations on the Intersection of Mobile Money and Regulation

There’s an App for That: The Potential and Pitfalls of Mobile Phone Banking

Protecting Mobile Money Against Financial Crimes