GSMA mWomen Programme

GSMA mWomen uses a variety of community strategies and tools to focus attention on the mobile user experience of underserved women. The goal is to help women feel more comfortable using mobile phones, thus maximising potential for life-enhancing benefits of the tool. Key activities include:

• Providing human resource grants to GSMA mWomen Working Group members to help them identify and implement at scale new commercial and social opportunities, products and services for underserved women;
• Providing grants for NGOs to collaborate with mobile operators in designing activities that address the barriers to women's mobile phone usage, particularly technical literacy and cultural barriers. For instance, the Design Challenge is a competition that seeks creative solutions for making the smartphone user experience more intuitive for technically illiterate users, particularly women, in developing countries. Winners will receive prizes up to US$20,000 and will have the opportunity to speak with potential investors interested in commercialising strong innovations. (Entries can be submitted until December 14 2012);
• Conducting research into women's wants and needs, including for mobile value-added services, such as mobile payments - for example, to mark International Women's Day 2012, GSMA mWomen released the research report Striving and Surviving - Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid. This is a detailed exploration of the data collected during a 9-month study conducted in partnership with the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), with primary research undertaken by TNS. In order to help others engage the public in its science, this toolkit includes all research tools used to create the GSMA mWomen research reports released in 2012 into the wants and needs of women living at the base of the pyramid (BoP), which are those living on under US$2 a day. The toolkit is available for organisations to use to replicate the research in their own markets. It features an ethnography observation guide, focus group discussion (FGD) guides, strategies for an opinion leader to use in holding a discussion group, and a wants and needs questionnaire;
• Assessing and effectively replicating pilot projects for bringing women into the retail stream of the mobile value chain;
• Consulting with mobile network operators to design and operationalise customer strategies for reaching underserved women;
• Designing and disseminating an underserved women's marketing toolkit to demonstrate how mobile industry marketing campaigns can be leveraged for behaviour change communications (BCC), which will be published in 2013 and, at that time, will be available here;
• Institutionalising underserved women as a recognised market segment by implementing and awarding an mWomen Global Mobile Award, which rewards the best mobile product or service designed for women in emerging markets as part of the industry awards at GSMA's annual Mobile World Congress; and
• Sharing knowledge and catalysing the replication of best practices throughout the mobile industry and international development community - in part through the interactive GSMA mWomen website.

Women, Technology

According to organisers, mobile phone adoption in the developing world is growing at a rapid rate; 4 out of 5 mobile connections are in developing countries. However, research by the GSMA and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women showed that a woman in a low- to middle-income country is 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This mobile phone gender gap represents 300 million women in the developing world without access. GSMA studies have shown that a 10% increase in mobile phone penetration rates has led to an additional 1.2% increase in gross domestic product (GDP) in low- and middle-income countries. Benefits from mobile technologies include: improving women's literacy and girls' education, advancing access to health and education, supporting women's civic participation and activism, increasing the sense of security and independence for women, and amplifying economic opportunities and incomes for women living under US$2 per day. "Because women direct the majority of their income to their families and communities, these benefits are widely shared. Thus, women and mobiles are a powerful combination for development outcomes."