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Title Digital Financial Services and Women's Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania
Full text https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z88s5d9; https://escholarship.org/content/qt0z88s5d9/qt0z88s5d9.pdf
Date 2024
Author(s) Heath, Rachel; Riley, Emma
Abstract Can increasing women's use of digital financial services raise their empowerment? We test this hypothesis using a randomized control trial with 152 female microfinance groups in Tanzania, where treated groups were randomly switched to repay their loan using mobile money instead of cash. This exogenous shift in women's use of mobile money for loan repayment substantially increases their use for other types of transactions. Women's control over their finances increases, they have higher levels of empowerment in the household and expenditures shift towards goods plausibly aligned with their preferences. These findings highlight the benefits of greater use of digital technologies for women.
Subject(s) Technological Change: Choices and Consequences • Diffusion Processes; Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation; Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development; Economics of Gender • Non-labor Discrimination; Tanzania
Publisher eScholarship, University of California
Type of publication article
Format application/pdf
Rights public
Identifier qt0z88s5d9
Repository Berkeley - University of California
Added to C-A: 2024-09-30;09:18:53