Karra Presents on Gender and Mobile Money
Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School for Global Studies at Boston University, present some preliminary findings from an ongoing study, which he is supporting in Mozambique.
The study aims to increase both the number of people registering for MPesa – mobile phone-based money transfer service – in the Nampula province of Mozambique, especially women, and the number of those people actually using MPesa once registered.This project is being undertaken by Vodacom/MPesa in collaboration with the NGO Mobiles for All (M4A) in Mozambique to test scaleable low-cost approaches to increasing the percentage of low-income Mozambicans, especially women, who: 1) register for mobile money, and 2) use mobile money. The longer term aims of this project are to increase access to financial services, particularly for women, and target spending toward seasons of key health risk (e.g. high-risk malaria seasons).When asked to comment on the results, Karra said the following:
Our preliminary findings show that clients, particularly female clients, who were randomly assigned to female promoters were more likely to convert to MPesa than clients who were randomly assigned to male promoters. In addition, female promoters were as likely to convert female clients to MPesa as male clients.
Final results from this study will likely be made available by the end of 2020.
Mahesh Karra’s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. Read more about him here.