2013-05-18T16:24:17-04:00 Henriette Kolb http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=henriette-kolb Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Henriette Kolb Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2828163 2013-03-07T19:00:00-05:00 2013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00

Henriette Kolb http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henriette-kolb/
MasterCard has just launched MasterPass, a mobile payment system and Visa launched its own service called V.me last year. This is good news in a globally underserved market where approximately 2.5 billion people are unable to access financial services. Within the emerging markets, countries in Africa are leading in the adoption of mobile payment services with products such as Tigo Pesa in Tanzania, MobileMoney in Nigeria, Airtel Money in Uganda, Zaad Telesom in Somalia and many more beyond just the obvious M-Pesa in Kenya dotting the African landscape.

Women in most parts of the world struggle particularly to obtain a loan, access suitable savings products or even to simply open a bank account. Accessing capital is the challenge that continues to come up as a top priority across many of the programmes supporting women entrepreneurs. Statistically women have lower financial literacy rates than men. Interest rates on loans can be higher for women and financial institutions are often reluctant to give out loans to women, unless they have a male partner and high-value collateral. When women do receive loans, they tend to be at lower values.

GSMA (the global association of mobile operators) and Visa jointly released a report at the Mobile World Congress, Unlocking the Potential: Women and Mobile Financial Services in Emerging Markets. In it they outline the opportunities the mobile phone brings for women who find it difficult to access financial services in developing and emerging economies and who are yet to be fully included in mobile retail channels.

A few obstacles need to be overcome though before promoting mobile money as a remedy for the financial access gender gap. The report states that 34% of women in Tanzania, 13% of women in Kenya and 10% of women in in Papua New Guinea who say they want to try mobile financial services cite the lack of a phone as the main reason for not having done so. Prior research by GSMA and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women indicates that the lack of perceived value is another barrier to women's use of mobile.

If these obstacles are addressed, a mobile phone in the hands of a woman can be a vital tool for access to finance and to a wider customer network. Lilian Adhiambo for example used to sell second hand clothes on the shore of Lake Victoria in Kenya. She was one of 5,000 women entrepreneurs who took part in CARE International UK and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women's Nyanza Women's Economic Empowerment initiative in Kenya.

Lilian attended several trainings and was introduced to mobile money through the project and as a result, expanded her business to three units in different locations. She uses her mobile phone for financial transactions and to communicate with her employees.

In a nutshell, with the right business training and equipped with a mobile phone as well as financing options, women can become financially independent and feel much safer. Mobile technology can be a vehicle for savings, insurance, payments and a way to obtain credit, but it is on its own not enough. Efforts need to span from improving the regulatory environment to better educating clients on their financial rights and enabling them to fully understand the choices available.

Clearly, there is a need for better policies and practice within the private and public sector to support women in a sustainable way to access capital and financial training. It is a complex task to design adequate programmes of scale across sectors that aim at ensuring women's financial inclusion in unbanked or under-banked markets but some organisations are making headway. DFID together with GIZ, on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), recently published a helpful toolkit: Promoting Women's Financial Inclusion. The toolkit offers a model to developing financial services that will enhance women's financial inclusion and enable economic empowerment of women.

A lot more is happening around fostering financial inclusion such as CARE's Banking on Change initiative, which aims to improve the quality of life for poor people by extending and developing access to basic financial services through savings led microfinance and the Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign which aims to mobilise stakeholders worldwide to achieve full financial inclusion by the year 2020 to just name a few.

The time is right to create a global movement around this issue and ensure it remains visible as an integral component for the post-2015 agenda. Women's financial inclusion and economic participation is a powerful yet underutilised weapon against poverty. Mobile financial services can help us make faster progress in achieving financial inclusion so that ultimately 2.5 billion can fully participate in economies around the world.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2472680 2013-01-14T12:14:17-05:00 2013-03-16T05:12:02-04:00

Henriette Kolb http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henriette-kolb/
The digital revolution presently excludes the majority of the world's population. According to data released in Intel's Women and the Web report, 4.6 billion people lack access to the developmental power of the Internet. However the situation is even worse for women and girls. As the report reveals, women in developing countries are almost 25% less likely to have access to the Internet, and this figure soars up to nearly 45% in Sub-Saharan Africa. This gender gap is even slightly higher than the mobile phone gender gap, which was estimated to be on average 21% in developing countries. It comes as no surprise that digital exclusion often compounds existing forms of disadvantage for women and girls.

What type of technology access is important for women and girls and how can the digital gender gap be reduced? These were some of the questions debated among over 100 ICT and gender experts who came together at the forum in Washington DC. Key determinants that keep women off-line include affordability, digital literacy, language barriers, lack of transport to often distant Internet cafes, lack of confidence, and cultural norms. For example, the report mentions that one out of five Indian and Egyptian women think that it is not appropriate for a woman to use the Internet.

All these barriers contribute to the digital exclusion of women and girls. Yet if this gap is closed, women themselves, households and economies would benefit tremendously. The Intel report estimates that if only 40% of women and girls in developing countries had access to the Internet, it would allow for significantly improved health, education, employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for over half a billion women and girls. It would also contribute over $10 billion to GDP across 144 developing countries. Shikoh Gitau, a forum participant from Google's Nairobi office, highlighted the importance of digital literacy. She explained how having access to virtual networks can lead to increased confidence and business opportunities.

I have seen these benefits for myself many times from the Cherie Blair Foundation's e-Mentoring programme for women. We often have women entrepreneurs involved in our programmes who are relatively new to the internet but eager to learn. In some cases, we offer opportunities for the women to practice using applications to access the e-Mentoring platform before meeting their mentors for the first time online. I recently chatted to Laila, a woman entrepreneur from Malaysia. She wanted to try out her ICT skills with me before the actual mentoring started. She told me that this was the first time she had ever used her English since school and the first time she was in contact with a person outside Malaysia. She was incredibly excited to be paired with a business mentor and now a few months in, attests to the many advantages such a relationship can bring. The internet has truly expanded Laila's world.

There are obvious benefits of connecting women and girls to the Internet, with sufficient training and guidance. We simultaneously need to consider the challenges that the Internet can pose to women and girl's learning and personal safety. Providing access to the web with the right support could create opportunities for billions. Let's encourage educators, regulators, policy makers and the private sector to work together on opening up the transformative power of connectivity for all.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1820937 2012-08-23T19:00:00-04:00 2012-10-23T05:12:11-04:00

Henriette Kolb http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henriette-kolb/
The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women supports these women entrepreneurs, providing them with a variety of resources and tools to overcome barriers they may encounter. In our published report Mobile Value Added Services: A Business Growth Opportunity for Women Entrepreneurs in partnership with the ExxonMobil Foundation, we demonstrated that business barriers in emerging markets can be addressed through the development of targeted mobile phone services. We launched this research at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this year and are now following up on our findings, carrying out recommendations from the report with the mobile technology sector to deliver a service specifically tailored for women business owners in developing and emerging markets.

This week, in partnership with Nokia and MTN Nigeria, we are launching Business Women, a new mobile phone service for women looking to grow their small-scale enterprise in Nigeria. Designed with the experiences of Nigerian women entrepreneurs in mind, the service was developed by international and Nigerian entrepreneurship experts. It provides valuable, bite-size information on business management such as advice on working with traders, how to improve distribution channels, the steps required to register a business in Nigeria and how to tap into valuable business networks. Customers who opt into this service will receive four to five text messages with business tips per week and also have the option of taking a weekly multiple choice quiz to test what they've learned.

We will introduce Business Women in conjunction with a project that provides hands-on business skills training to over 2,000 women entrepreneurs in Nigeria in partnership with the Youth for Technology Foundation. We look forward to charting the progress of the women entrepreneurs who use Business Women and to following this launch with mobile services for women entrepreneurs in Indonesia and Egypt soon.

www.cherieblairfoundation.org]]>