On the International Day of Rural Women we are pleased to share a focus note on Designing & Marketing Mobile Information & Advisory Services for Women Smallholders.
Under the mFarmer Initiative, one of our key areas is working with mobile service providers and agricultural organisations to ensure their Agri VAS (Agricultural Value Added Services) are equally accessible to women smallholder farmers as they are to men. The focus note provides practical and actionable lessons from subject matter experts on how to design and market mobile services for women farmers.
This blog post contains some highlights from the focus note- to download the full version please click here.
Considering Gender in Service and Social Programs Matters for Social Outcomes (Haven Ley, Program Officer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
“There is no evidence of positive social outcomes where women alone have simply been targeted with services and programs, without including and bringing along her household and community. In some cases, to influence women’s lives it is mandatory to actually target the male in her household.”
Leveraging Consumer Insights Research to Design Life-Enhancing Mobile Services for Women (Beth Gertz and Julia Burchell, GSMA mWomen Programme)
The GSMA mWomen Programme’s Striving and Surviving report identified common themes about how BoP women engage with mobile, with interesting implications for mobile operators and others seeking to reach women with life-enhancing mobile value-added services. For example, the study revealed an ‘SMS utility gap’. While 77% of respondents had used a mobile phone, only 37% had used SMS, and many reported not finding SMS services useful. These findings suggest that to be effective, mobile services must reflect women’s needs and must offer a clear value proposition.
Service Design for Women (Sophie Huyer, Executive Director, WISAT -Women in Global Science & Technology)
5 steps to developing successful gender-targeted ICT for agriculture initiatives: Do a gender analysis of opportunities for ICTs; Develop appropriate content to meet the needs of women and men farmers; Consider the connection of the mobile to a range of ICTs; Identify employment opportunities for women with agricultural-related ICT service providers; Collect sex-disaggregated data.
Marketing Agricultural Services to Women (Jemimah Njuki, CARE’s Women in Agriculture Pathways Initiative)
Tips on how to ensure agricultural services reach and benefit women include providing integrated services that respond to women’s multiple roles in agriculture and their households; using group based and participatory approaches that enable women to articulate their needs for services and provide feedback; and using approaches that create demand and define the needs of women farmers.
Commercial Reasons to Cater to Women Farmers (Amol Jadhav, mFarmer Project Manager, GSMA Mobile for Development)
Designing services for women farmers is not just “good” in terms of women’s empowerment and human rights. There is a compelling reason for mobile service operators to take a close look at the female subscriber segment as a commercial opportunity. The Women and Mobile report by the GSMA and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women demonstrated that the global mobile phone gender gap stands at an estimated 300 million women, representing a $13 billion missed market opportunity for the mobile industry.
We welcome feedback and ideas on how to develop successful strategies for reaching women farmers with agricultural services, products or initiatives. Please share your feedback below or get in touch at [email protected].