AusAID to help provide cellphones to third world women

Stuart Corner
Monday, 05 December 2011 11:02

IT Industry - Development

Australia's overseas aid agency, AusAID, has teamed up with its US counterpart USAID, and with global cellular industry body GSMA and Visa in a three year program designed to increase mobile phone ownership among women in the developing world.

Their collaboration will be run through the GSMA's mWomen Program's Global Development Alliance - launched in October 2010 in the hope that the women will make effectively use of mobile phones to access life-enhancing information, networks and services - such as banking, education and healthcare.

In June AusAID awarded the program a $US533,800 grant to help the program achieve its goals of closing the mobile phone gender gap and provide life-changing services to women in the developing world.

The program was announced jointly by Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd and US secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton in Busan South Korea last week.

According to the GSMA its studies have shown that a 10 percent increase in mobile phone use has led to a 1.2 percent increase in gross domestic product (GDP) in low- and middle-income countries. However, the research also indicated that women in the developing world are 21 percent less likely than men to own a mobile phone.

Clinton said: "For 300 million women in low- and middle- income countries, mobile technology is still out of reach. It's not simply because it's too expensive'¦but it's because of an array of economic and social barriers, from a lack of literacy to a lack of income to the all-too-common belief that cellphones afford more freedom to women than they deserve."

Rudd added that a wide range of social and economic benefits could be delivered by extending mobile phone ownership to women. "Mobile phones can provide women living in remote and rural areas with access to bank accounts and formal credit. In Pakistan, text messaging has been used to deliver basic literacy and numeracy classes. In India, texts have been used to provide agricultural commodity prices at markets, helping women to get the best prices for their produce."

Visa chairman and CEO, Joseph Saunders, said: "Around the world, we have begun to see the power that mobile technology can have in extending the reach of electronic payments, providing the unbanked with tools for payments and other life-enhancing financial services, and bringing new participants into the global financial system."