Importance of Mobile Phone Services for Women Entrepreneurs
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: October 6, 2015
WUNRN
Direct Link to Study Report – MOBILE
VALUE ADDED SERVICES: A BUSINESS GROWTH OPPORTUNITY FOR WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS
_____________________________________________________________________
THE IMPORTANCE OF MOBILE PHONE
SERVICES FOR WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS
By Ken Banks – 10/05/2012
At
the Networked Society Forum in Hong Kong last November, I sat and listened as
Jeffrey Sachs described mobile connectivity as “the single most important
instrument for development that we have.” Few people would disagree. A
recent study by the GSM Association reported a 10% increase in mobile phone use
leads to a 1.2% increase in a country’s GDP. Encouraging as this may be, it’s
only half the story.
Women in the developing world are 21% less likely than men to own a mobile,
leaving an estimated 300 million excluded from the social and economic
opportunities that owning one might bring. If mobile phones do increase opportunity,
then right now they’re not increasing it for everyone. Closing this
“mobile gender gap” doesn’t just make sense for women – it’s also an
opportunity believed to be worth a staggering $13 billion to network operators
annually.
Empowering girls and women has long been a focus for the development
community, and it’s easy to see why. In Sub Saharan Africa women produce 80% of
household food and, when educated women run family farms, they’re able to
increase yields by up to 20%. Research also suggests that increasing the
earning power of women has additional benefits for the entire family through
improvements in health, education and child nutrition. And when educated girls
start earning an income, 90% of it is put straight back into their families.
The number is nearer 40% for men. Yet, despite all this in many parts of the
world women are more likely to go hungry than men, the number of girls out of
school almost universally exceeds the number of boys, and – in the case of Sub
Saharan Africa – women own only 1% of the land.
Whilst the introduction of the mobile phone alone is unlikely to solve any
of these problems directly, targeted interventions can. Defining this
opportunity is crucial, according to ‘Mobile Value Added Services: A Business
Growth Opportunity for Women Entrepreneurs,’ a new report released today by the
Cherie Blair Foundation for Women with support from the ExxonMobil Foundation.
This milestone study is a major step for the Foundation – which tasks itself
with helping women entrepreneurs across Africa, South East Asia and the Middle
East – as it seeks to leverage the power of mobile phones and services for the
women entrepreneurs its wider programmes support.
One key objective of the study, which focused mostly on Indonesia, Nigeria
and Egypt, was to identify the most useful mobile value-added services which
enable women entrepreneurs to advance their businesses. In the study, over 88%
of women entrepreneurs said they were willing to use these services to address
the core business challenges they face, and more than 82% of women
entrepreneurs indicated a willingness to pay for them. Demand for the right
service is clearly there. Identifying what those services should be was a key
driver for commissioning the report.
Although mobile value added services were abundant in many of the areas
covered in the study (over 200 different products were reviewed) surprisingly,
none were tailored for the specific needs of women entrepreneurs. The Cherie
Blair Foundation is now working with a number of commercial and non-profit
partners to fill that gap and to provide a service that an overwhelming
majority of women entrepreneurs desperately need.
Categories: Uncategorized
