Announcing “Hey Sister! Show Me the Mobile Money!’
Now more than ever women need to be able to use mobile phones to manage their financial lives. According to GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap Report 2020, women are 20% less likely to use mobile internet than men, down from 27% in 2017. However, the lack of access, training and inadequate digital financial education still presents a large barrier to women across the globe.
In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and the need to go cashless while observing social distancing restrictions, Strategic Impact Advisors (SIA), with funding from USAID and the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative, has launched a digital financial literacy campaign to increase women’s ability to access and use mobile money services.
“Hey Sister! Show Me the Mobile Money” is an IVR (interactive voice response) campaign made up of 10 short audio episodes following the storylines of three characters — Annette, Myriam and Josephine — as they navigate the terrain of DFS during COVID-19 and make every-day transactions common for mobile money users, such as opening an account or sending and receiving payments. The curriculum and characters were inspired by the human-centered design funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented by IDEO.org, which created global archetypes of women and their financial behaviors.
Hey Sister! was launched in mid-October in Ghana, Uganda and Malawi through Viamo’s 3-2-1 service. This platform has proven to be easy to use with basic feature phones, used by many of the women living in rural and peri-urban areas in each of the three countries. Campaign lessons are designed to raise awareness and confidence among women so that they may consider and use DFS to support their economic goals and grow their financial independence. As Annette, Myriam and Josephine learn how to safely and effectively use mobile money to manage their finances, they enrich their lives and the lives of those around them in turn.
SIA and its partners want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to access campaign material and train the women in their communities. This literacy campaign is designed to be used not only by its partners but by anyone with an interest in building digital financial literacy. To ensure that as many women as possible benefit from this campaign, facilitation guides and other resources can be found on the Hey Sister! site. The audio content is also available for download to help support leaders, local champions and anyone interested in facilitating discussions around digital financial literacy but who are not in the three countries where the IVR campaign is currently underway.
SIA has engaged with partners in Ghana, Malawi and Uganda who are working with women to advance their economic empowerment. From an agricultural industrial trading organization working with over 45,000 women smallholder farmers in Ghana to a microfinance and cooperative trust in Uganda serving over 10,000 smallholder farmers and small business owners, these partners are ready participants in building women's economic empowerment. They serve as trusted advisors and ambassadors for the campaign.