Smartphone Ownership, Economic Empowerment and Women’s Property Rights: Experimental Evidence from Malawi

In the couples’ treatment, women participants received the handsets, but their husbands were also invited to the phone distribution to take part in a training program designed to increase acceptance of women’s use of smartphones, property rights over the device, and men’s public recognition of those rights in front of other community members. [...] • How do the technological benefits of owning a smartphone compare to receiving the equivalent value of the handset as an unconditional cash grant? A large and influential literature points to the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of providing households with cash that they can allocate according to their priorities and needs. [...] We found that both the Individual and Couples conditions were effective in increasing women’s mobile phone ownership and technical efficacy through greater mobile connectivity (e.g., access to the internet and social media), use of digital financial services, and financial inclusion based on a series of self-reported survey questions and two behavioral measures: of phone ownership (whether the par. [...] Members of these groups are over 60 percentage points more likely than the Control to report owning a phone; moreover, many were still in possession of the itel smartphone provided during 7 This included 95% of the Couples; 93.8% of the Individual group; 95.5% in the Cash, and 92.3% in the Control group. [...] In the behavioral test, those assigned to the Couples and Individual conditions chose mobile money and had it sent to their accounts at a rate of 49% and 45%, respectively, compared to a control mean of 15%.