Phone Ownership by Women Lower Compared to Men – Report

Gallup data on phone ownership show that while women’s ownership rate in the developing world stands quite high at 80 percent, it is still lower than men’s ownership rates of 87 percent.

The gender gap is deepest in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East at around 11 percentage points. Latin America and the Caribbean have the smallest gender gap at just 3 percentage points.

According to New Insights on Women’s Mobile Phone Ownership by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), promoting mobile phone ownership among women does not easily lead to women’s use of mobile money, and more research is needed to understand how to leverage mobile phones for payments and other financial services for women.

In particular, further research should focus on how to promote digital accounts and payments for young women, whose rates of mobile phone ownership are often higher than that of older women.

The proliferation of mobile phone ownership and use across the developing world has been seen as a major opportunity for women’s financial inclusion. Mobile phone ownership has the potential to address many of the barriers women face when accessing and using financial services, particularly those related to mobility, time, safety, and privacy.

Mobile phones can enable poor women to access important information and services, including much needed financial services, to help them grow and support their businesses and meet household needs. For rural women, using mobile phones can reduce the time devoted to making transactions by allowing them to open mobile money accounts and make mobile money payments without having to travel long distances to bank branches.

In societies where women’s mobility is restricted, mobile phones enable women to make transactions from home, thus expanding their opportunities to engage in the formal economy.

The safety and privacy provided by mobile phones can give all women greater control over their money and how they choose to invest in their economic activities and households

The report further discloses that women in Sub-Saharan Africa who have access to mobile phones are increasingly using their phones to access financial services, including payments, savings, and credit (CGAP 2016; GSMA, 2015a). However, this is not the case outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Community of Practice on Women’s Financial Inclusion (COP) provides CGAP facilitated platforms to share experiences, identify key challenges, document and discuss emerging good practices, and solve common problems associated with increasing equitable access to and use of a broad range of financial services.