PSC Brown Bag Series: Digital Financial Services and Women’s Empowerment 

Full title: Digital Financial Services and Women’s Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania
Emma Riley presented research work at the April 22, 2024 brown bag session of the Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
Can increasing women's use of digital financial services improve their empowerment? Emma Riley presents a study to test this using a randomized control trial with 152 female microfinance groups in Tanzania where treated groups were randomly switched to repay their loan using mobile money instead of the usual method of cash. They find that this exogenous shift in the way that women use mobile money for loan repayment increases their use of mobile money for other transactions. Women's control over their finances increases, they have higher levels of empowerment in the household and expenditures shift towards goods aligned with their preferences. We see small positive effects of the shift to mobile money repayment on loan repayment behavior and social cohesion within the microfinance group. These findings highlight the benefits that encouraging greater use of digital technologies can bring to women.
The PSC Brown Bag Series runs live and on Zoom; find more about the Center and its events, including future brown bag seminars, at psc.isr.umich.edu