Understanding Barriers to Women’s Mobile Use in Low-Income Settings

What policies can close India's digital gender gap, and what does this mean for women’s broader well-being? Research by the team at Inclusion Economics sheds light on the interplay of barriers that restrict women’s phone use and tests levers to address them as a part of a study in Chhattisgarh, a state in central India.

Research to bridge the digital gender divide

In contexts where women have been predominantly excluded from the use of digital technologies, complex and interlinked social, economic, and human capital barriers may interplay to further curtail adoption and use of devices. In 2018, the Government of Chhattisgarh distributed free smartphones to over 2 million women, along with 1 GB of free data for the first 6 months, through a program called Sanchaar Kranti Yojana (SKY). In a subset of villages where SKY had been implemented, our team of Inclusion Economics researchers asked “would layering on interventions to go beyond affordability improve women’s retention and use of these new phones?”

To examine ways to maximize the benefits of the SKY program, a team including researchers from Inclusion Economics at Yale University and Inclusion Economics India Centre – in collaboration with researchers from Duke University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Warwick – launched a multi-pronged initiative to understand and address barriers to women’s access and use of digital technology. Building on findings from a robust set of formative research, our team designed a randomized controlled trial testing a brief, interactive, group-based digital literacy training for women who had received smartphones and a complementary calling service called Mor Awaaz, which provided women with information about relevant government schemes. Results from this study indicate that the digital literacy training increased women’s use of smartphones by 5 percentage points, improved their mental health outcomes, and liberalized beliefs about women’s internet use. For information on the quasi-experimental evaluation of the SKY program, click here.

Highlights

Indian women gathered in a circle using a mobile phone. — EPoD Harvard Flickr

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Mor Awaaz Fact Sheets

Mor Awaaz is a phone-based service for women, developed by a team of researchers from Yale University, Harvard University, University of Warwick, University of Southern California and Duke University, as well as EPoD India at LEAD. Its mission is to empower women as changemakers in their homes and communities by creating a dynamic information-sharing loop between women and the state government. In these two fact sheets, researchers identify women's levels of awareness of Covid-19 and anemia.

Mor Awaaz fact sheet - COVID19 awareness among rural women and frontline health workers.pdf

Mor Awaaz fact sheet - anemia awareness among rural women.pdf