Women’s Empowerment

Changing women’s lives
through mobile
We have set ourselves two parallel goals across
our businesses:
• to expand the benefits of mobile to a greater
number of women at all levels of society
through a range of targeted commercial
programmes; and
• to use our mobile technologies to enhance
the quality of women’s lives in three key
aspects:
– enabling financial inclusion;
– improving health and wellbeing; and
– building skills and entrepreneurship.
We believe our actions between now and 2025
will make a material difference to women, families,
communities and national economies across
the countries in which we operate. Over the next
decade, we will seek to help 50 million women
join the emerging markets mobile revolution.
Achieving these goals would have significant
multiplier effects throughout the societies in
which we operate. For example, girls growing
up in a household in which their mother was
empowered through mobile to communicate
freely on her own terms – as well as potentially
manage her own business and oversee the
family’s finances – would have a very different
role model to the current norm in some cultures.
Enabling financial inclusion
More than 2.5 billion people in low- and
middle-income countries do not have access to
conventional banking services. The majority of
them are women.
In 2007, Vodafone and our Kenyan affiliate
Safaricom developed the first mobile money
transfer service M-Pesa. M-Pesa is simple to
operate (payments are transmitted and received
using technology available on even the most basic
of 2G mobile phones), highly secure (transactions
are protected with enterprise-grade encryption)
and cheap and convenient. Worldwide, there are
now more than 4.5 billion M-Pesa transactions
every year and in countries such as Kenya and
Tanzania the service has largely replaced cash in
many people’s daily lives. M-Pesa now has more
than 25 million active users.
25 million
active users of M-Pesa – our
mobile money transfer service
With a mobile phone and an active M-Pesa
account, even people on very low incomes
gain control over their financial affairs. For
example, their exposure to common risks in a
low-income, cash-based society – such as street
robbery and petty corruption – is significantly
reduced. M-Pesa is used to manage business
transactions big and small, from the weekly
shopping in a Nairobi market to the purchase of
cotton for an Indian textile collective. We also
offer microfinance services as part of M-Pesa:
M-Shwari in Kenya and M-Pawa in Tanzania
provide access to advanced financial services
such as savings and insurance products and hire
purchase agreements.
In some cultures and demographics, women are
responsible for running the household but have
little or no ability to manage the money without
which the household cannot function. M-Pesa
helps put power over the family’s finances into
women’s hands, enabling them, for example,
to save money each week to pay for a child’s
education or to secure a small loan to set up
a business working from home.
Pre- and post-natal support in Turkey
Vodafone Turkey has developed a free
mobile information service in partnership
with a local maternal and infant healthcare
NGO, AÇEV. Women receive up to six free
text messages a week addressing healthcare
topics that are directly relevant to the
mother’s pregnancy calendar and, post-birth,
the first 18 months of the baby’s life.
The local Foundation also supports a free
health information service for all women, and
fathers can also choose to receive tailored
information as their babies grow. The service
has more than 160,000 active subscribers.
Women’s Empowerment | Vodafone Group Plc Sustainable Business Report 2015 -16 10