Striving and Surviving in Papua New Guinea: Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid.
The incredible global diversity in low-income women’s lives in emerging markets is plainly illustrated in the challenges and aspirations of women in Papua New Guinea. Connected Women’s latest report on the Pacific nation explores these lives. You can read it here: Striving and Surviving in Papua New Guinea: Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid.
Studying the realities of women surviving on less than 5 Kina per day (US$2.67), this report examines their daily lives, and the role mobile services play when the vast majority of the population is rurally based (87%), without electricity (88%) and does not have clean drinking water or access to sanitation facilities (50%). Having a better house, good education for their children and a healthy family are the top life priorities for women in low-income households in PNG. This is in-line with challenges of resource-poor women globally.
Mobile ownership is 21% across PNG, but amongst the women interviewed for this report, only 16% owned their own handset or SIM, and almost half of women surveyed (45%) had no access to a mobile phone at all.
Amongst the common barriers to women’s mobile phone adoption at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP), it is interesting to note that all Connected Women’s oft cited obstacles (cost, technical literacy, coverage, power and social/ cultural barriers) are keenly felt in PNG. Significantly, 96% of women without a mobile phone said that they could not afford one, underlining the strongest barrier to women’s adoption, cost. Despite this financial obstacle, more than 50% of non-subscribers were still interested in purchasing a handset, and among subscribers, around 1/3 of those surveyed spent 10-20% of their total weekly income on mobile services highlighting the importance that women place in communication.
Women in PNG often want an opportunity for agency, with resource-poor women in PNG rarely holding positions of power in their households. Only 12% self-identified as the main decision maker and 17% as joint decision makers. Female relationships are very strong, with 29% citing female friends as their first port of call for advice on money matters, and a significant 59% attending a women’s group at least once a week. Male/female relationships experience more social/ cultural challenges: 22% of survey participants reporting that phone use makes their husbands suspicious of their activities.
Drawing on this research, GSMA Connected Women designed the Technical Literacy Toolkit (known has the Mobile Skills toolkit). PNG women’s desire to use their mobile to access the internet, pay for electricity and use mobile money services (26% voiced an interest in MFS), strongly portrayed the very low levels of fluency with mobile – less than 50% of women interviewed were comfortable sending or receiving a text message and only 65% could make a call. This reality puts these advanced services well out of reach of the average woman. The Mobile Skills Toolkit addresses the technical literacy challenges through half day workshops consisting of lessons, stories and interactive games. As with the PNG report, the Mobile Skills toolkit was designed through deep research with BoP women in rural and urban communities. At the time of publishing the toolkit had been used to train several thousand women in central marketplaces and coffee cooperatives.
Equally, PNG women’s demand for economic opportunities, financial services and healthcare along with their trust in each other’s advice counsel in these areas, directed Connected Women to develop the Group Coaching Service. This workshop series guides Government, NGO and private sector partners to deliver content and effectively interact with their beneficiaries/ clients through mobile. Working heavily with partners who serve women, the workshop illustrates how to best use mobile to leverage and further strengthen existing women’s networks and knowledge bases in PNG. To date, over 50 organisations in PNG have been taken part in three workshops in Port Moresby, Madang and Buka.
The Striving and Surviving in Papua New Guinea Report offers mobile operators, development practitioners and others a real insight into the lives of resource-poor women in PNG. It provides recommendations on the opportunities to offer this several-million-strong community with life-enhancing information and services, through a mobile phone.