Smartphone Ownership, Economic Empowerment And Women’S Property Rights: Experimental Evidence From Malawi

One of the most important technological advances over the last quarter-century has been the global diffusion of mobile phones. Yet, important inequities in digital rights persist. In many low-income countries, women are significantly less likely to own smartphones than men. We report the results of a large-scale randomized controlled trial (n=1,500) in Blantyre, Malawi that aims to better understand the causal impact of reducing the mobile gender gap and effective strategies to bolster women’s property rights over smartphones. We target our intervention to married women who at the outset of the study did not own a mobile phone. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: individual smartphone treatment; couples smartphone treatment; cash; and control. We are thus able to identify the effects of mobile connectivity on women’s economic well-being, household bargaining, and empowerment, benchmarked to the cash equivalent value of the smartphones. 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. Drawing on data collected 9 months after the intervention, we estimate the impact of smartphone ownership and couples’ training on women’s household bargaining power, empowerment, and community beliefs about the rights of women to own and use smartphones. Our research thus provides important insights into the influence of household and social factors on the effects of digital technologies in low-income countries—and mechanisms to strengthen digital rights for women.