An employee assists a customer
to set-up M-Pesa money transfer servive on his handset inside a
mobile phone care centre operated by Kenyan's telecom operator
Safaricom; in the central business district of Kenya's capital
Nairobi, May 11, 2016. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya
Impact most dramatic among those
who used M-Pesa, a text message-based mobile payment
system
"What we saw over six years was
impressive," Tavneet Suri, associate professor of Applied Economics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a
statement.
"When M-Pesa came to an area,
women shifted their occupations and their savings went
up."
Almost 200,000 Kenyan
households, many headed by poor, rural women, have lifted
themselves out of poverty using mobile money services, experts said
on Thursday, calling for the technology to be introduced in other
developing countries.
The impact was most dramatic
among single mothers who used M-Pesa, a text message-based mobile
payment system, after switching from farming to business and retail
sales, the journal Science found.
"What we saw over six years was
impressive," Tavneet Suri, associate professor of Applied Economics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a
statement.
"When M-Pesa came to an area,
women shifted their occupations and their savings went
up."
Women's rights and gender
equality,we highlights issues affecting women,
girls and transgender people.
The expansion of M-Pesa, which
is used in virtually every Kenyan home, lifted 194,000 households
-- or two percent of households nationwide -- above the poverty
line in six years, the study found.
It provides further evidence
that mobile phone technology can help to bring financial services
to the 80 percent of African women who do not have a bank account
and bolster growth of the world's poorest continent.
M-Pesa is a cheap way of
sending, receiving and saving money via more than 110,000 local
agents, often operating out of tiny kiosks in remote parts of
Kenya.
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It gives people who would
otherwise be unable to access traditional financial services a
simple, reliable and fast way of moving and saving
money.
Mobile money's impact on the
lives of poor women was one of the most exciting aspects of the
study, experts said, as policymakers have struggled to understand
what kinds of projects are most effective at reducing
poverty.
Researchers found that the
number of female-headed households living in extreme poverty fell
by 22 percent within a 1 kilometre radius of an area where six new
M-Pesa agents opened between 2008 and 2010.
There was no impact on
male-headed households.
"Sometimes the poor, and poor
women in particular, just need access to the right set of simple
tools to help themselves," said Annie Duflo, executive director of
Innovations for Poverty Action, a research and policy group that
took part in the study.
"Hopefully these results will
inform and encourage the targeted scaling of mobile money services
in other countries."
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