With the support of
With the support of
With the support of
The ability to access and utilize a smartphone is widely seen as an enabling factor for improved economic livelihoods. But in Sub-Saharan Africa, a stubborn gender divide means fewer women can take advantage of smartphones for earning income.
A joint project between M-KOPA, Yale Inclusion Economics, and Caribou sought to identify and test new approaches to reducing the gender gap in Kenya. With millions of smartphones sold in the country, M-KOPA’s
asset-based financing business offers a rare opportunity to mitigate those barriers at scale. By basing this analysis on M-KOPA’s existing customer base, this project aimed to generate insights and learnings that could be applied to active commercial efforts, for direct impact.
Overall, the project included workstreams aimed at understanding the problem space, others at generating evidence, and still others for testing different interventions via randomly controlled trials. The workstream presented here provided an analysis of actual smartphone digital behavior to understand the differences in how men and women use their devices in daily life. The Caribou Data platform allowed a panel of M-KOPA smartphone customers to anonymously share activity data directly from their devices, providing insights into app usage, data consumption and financial transactions.
The result was a unique set of insights around digital activity that can help M-KOPA and other practitioners to better understand how women in particular use their smartphones in day-to-day life, a critical step in delivering products and services that best meet their needs.
