
Mindful Saving: Exploring the Power of Savings for Women (Factsheet)
A safe, efficient, and reliable mobile savings platform to grow women’s businesses
Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
A safe, efficient, and reliable mobile savings platform to grow women’s businesses
More from the evidence-based report series on women’s economic empowerment:
“Mindful Saving: Exploring the Power of Savings for Women”
“A Meta-Analysis of the Take-Up and Utilization of Formal Savings Accounts”
Rose Kibona, a 59-year-old woman entrepreneur in Mbeya, Tanzania, has a stall in an open market where she sells soft drinks and prepared meals. She recently took a business training course administered by TechnoServe that included instruction on accessing M-Pawa, a new Vodafone mobile savings platform. She had been saving informally for years, relying on insecure containers like jars and bags. She planned to buy a car with the money saved in a large bag, and had a lockbox to save for emergencies. She exemplified the mindful saving behavior of many women micro and small entrepreneurs in developing countries, using mental discipline and making money less fungible by mentally allocating savings for a purpose. But M-Pawa gave her a safe, efficient, and reliable platform to grow her business and transform her livelihood.
These obstacles include those that stem from women’s subordinate position in the family and lower decision-making power that affect business investment decisions negatively; women’s traditional household and care responsibilities that impose time and travel restrictions; and traditional social norms that restrict women’s access to productive resources and services. A database of more than 230 rigorous program evaluations, show that smart designs (including access to reliable savings) that address these constraints head-on can bring substantial benefits to women and be relatively simple to implement.
Women are often disproportionately burdened by high transaction costs to access savings accounts.
“Smart design” has the potential to address gender constraints and benefit women.
When it comes to saving money, women are far ahead of their male counterparts.
Female values as a percentage of male values
Knowing all this the Center for Global Development, with support from the ExxonMobil Foundation and in collaboration with research and implementing partners, further tested the power of mobile savings and business training. It launched two randomized controlled trials in 2015, in Indonesia and in Tanzania, to assess the power of mobile savings and training for women entrepreneurs.
Financial service providers received financial incentives to promote a new mobile savings product to women entrepreneurs. The women received training to increase uptake of mobile savings.
Women microentrepreneurs in two cities received access to an interest-bearing mobile savings platform, M-Pawa. Some women also received 12 weekly training sessions on business skills.
Short-term results for Tanzania show that mobile savings increase savings and empower women—and quality business training bolsters savings and improves business practices
Results from Tanzania suggest that women’s access to the M-Pawa mobile savings platform had a significant impact on women’s savings and that adding business training enhanced the economic outcomes.
Both the amounts deposited and the amounts withdrawn increased significantly.
Relative to women in the control group, women who had access to M-Pawa and received business training were 4.6 percentage points more likely to operate a second business and, as a result, generated approximately $2 in additional monthly profits.
The mobile savings platform also had a positive subjective impact on women’s economic empowerment and well-being.
Tanzanian shillings
Percent of study participants answering “yes”
A follow-up evaluation is now under way, and findings from Indonesia are forthcoming.
Connect with us at http://www.shecounts.com/ to receive updates on the pilot study.
For more information, see Mindful Saving: Exploring the Power of Savings for Women. Report 1, Evidence-based Report Series on Women’s Economic Empowerment. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.
This work was funded by a grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation to the Center for Global Development.
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