GSMA Connected Women awarded an Innovation Fund grant to HNI to add gender content to its 3-2-1 information service deployed in partnership with Airtel in Madagascar. Today, we are releasing a case study outlining the journey to the development of the gender content and the lessons learned in the process. The full case study is available here.
3-2-1 is a free, on-demand voice and text-based information service that has attracted over 3 million Airtel Madagascar subscribers since it launched in March 2010. As a result of the GSMA Connected Women grant, HNI conducted extensive consumer insights research, which confirmed that in Madagascar many women are not aware of their rights and gender-based violence is a major problem. In an effort to bridge this information gap, HNI created the first ever on-demand gender information service for women in Madagascar.
Consumer insights research and a committee of gender experts allowed HNI to create relevant gender content for the 3-2-1 service
As part of the Connected Women grant, HNI conducted extensive research to inform the new gender content of the 3-2-1 service. The research reinforced the initial finding that there was significant gender inequality in Madagascar, and that in spite of the law taking a firm stand against gender-based violence and discrimination, many women were not aware of their rights. For example, gender-based violence is a major problem: many of the men and women who were surveyed believed that rape and sexual assault were at least partly the victim’s fault if she wore seductive clothing or used inappropriate language.
HNI gathered a committee of local gender experts to review the results of the consumer insights research and ensure that the gender content that was going to be disseminated through 3-2-1 was relevant to the target audience.
Access to information via mobile can spur behaviour change for both men and women
Early M&E results show that the 3-2-1 gender service is already having an impact on users’ lives and, critically, has led to behaviour change. 96.6% of female users found the gender content had added value to their lives, and 62% agreed that the gender content had changed their behaviour. The qualitative research showed that female users in particular felt the service had helped them understand issues around women’s rights and related topics, and they had been able to apply this knowledge to their lives and share it with their husbands and children.
Collecting the gender of the 3-2-1 users can provide useful gender data to the operator
Gender data can be used to understand customers’ mobile services usage, which is key to crafting strategies to increase penetration and design new robust services that meet customers’ unique needs. In the case of HNI, Airtel was not utilising the gender data of their subscribers. This is because the gender data was found to be not reliable (when registering for a SIM card, Airtel noticed a tendency for men to register on behalf of women) and not reflective of the actual customer base, as in Madagascar SIM cards are often times sold on the street, making it impossible to Airtel to know the gender of the users. HNI therefore decided to include a gender question when users were accessing the 3-2-1 gender service to provide Airtel with reliable gender data.
Although there have been issues with self-reported gender, especially flip-floppers, asking users to select their gender before accessing the 3-2-1 resulted in the correct gender being identified 80% of the time.
Investing in M&E and data analysis helped HNI and Airtel to understand the real impact of the service
A deeper analysis of the customer journey helped HNI and Airtel understand how customers were engaging with the service, where the key bottlenecks were, and what was driving repeat usage.
Insights from the M&E analysis can then be used in multiple ways:
- To create a business case to deploy the service to other markets, as has been the case with 3-2-1.
- To better inform marketing strategies, thereby increasing penetration of the service.
- To better understand what content is most popular. Data on the hits and listening ratios can be used to improve content by removing or tweaking messages or, for example, changing the order in which they appear.
- To reveal the bottlenecks in the customer journey. In the case of 3-2-1, the number of exits at the gender question would need to be looked at more carefully to determine if it is due to a technical issue or the way the question is worded.