Digital Financial Services

Lauren Hendricks and team at CARE in Uganda will analyze whether motivating women to use mobile financial technology increases their involvement in making household financial decisions, and subsequently improves family health and education. They will develop mobile money subwallets for specific purposes such as school fees and pregnancy so that women can more securely manage their savings. They will also work with influential members of a subset of households to help promote gender equality and develop a consensus towards a household financial action plan.

Kathleen Colson of The BOMA Project, Inc. in Kenya will investigate, measure and document how participation in BOMA's Rural Entrepreneur Access Project (REAP)--a holistic two-year program of sequenced interventions--translates to such gender-influenced outcomes as increased household financial decision-making by women, increased education opportunities for girls and increased food security and use of healthcare by the household.

Flora Myamba of Repoa Ltd. in Tanzania will evaluate different methods for motivating women to use mobile financial services by performing a randomized control trial in Tanzania. Access to mobile money platforms in developing countries can help alleviate poverty, but many people, particularly women, do not own a mobile phone, and if they do, it is unclear whether they will use it for financial purposes.

Frederic Pivetta of Real Impact Analytics in Luxembourg will develop a platform and applications to leverage data from telecom operators to identify individuals in developing countries, who are often women, without access to digital financial services. They hypothesize that these isolated individuals display unique cell phone behaviors that they can use to identify them. Once identified, they can be directly targeted with appropriate campaigns and products to encourage them to get beneficial financial services such as mobile money accounts.

Rohini Pande of Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government in the U.S. and colleagues Simone Schaner, Erica Field, Natalia Rigol, and Charity Troyer-Moore will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to capture information on the financial access and practices of the rural poor in Madhya Pradesh, India. The system will also enable these people to interact with the formal financial system and receive government benefits.

Wilson Cusack from Trade Co. in the U.S. will develop an SMS-based platform to provide information on market prices and facilitate trade for small-scale farmers in developing countries. The platform will maintain user anonymity, and also handle payments thereby promoting the use of mobile money. It will also enable the arrangement of transportation of goods, and provide a database for monitoring agricultural production and markets. He will further develop the platform for pilot-testing by 100 farmers in Ghana.

Tyler Radford from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in the U.S. will partner with the local tech community in Uganda to develop web- and phone-based applications that enable individuals to locate their nearest financial services such as an ATM or mobile money provider, and help financial service providers identify the best locations to expand access across developing countries.

Travis Lybbert of the University of California, Davis, in the U.S. will develop a simple, low-cost approach that uses mobile phone records to track changes in living standards and use it to evaluate new mobile money saving products and services in Haiti. They will develop prediction algorithms for mobile phone records using in-person and phone surveys collected as part of a planned randomized control trial (RCT), which will be used to evaluate a new type of savings account they are developing with a leading mobile services provider.