PIERI-20165 Information, Price, and Barriers to Adoption and Usage of Mobile Money: Evidence from a Field Experiment in The Gambia

Abstract

In this project, we intend to work with a private mobile money service provider in Gambia (Qodoo mobile money) to study the responsiveness of mobile money usage to changes in monetary cost in the form of withdrawal fees. Gambia is one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and significant portion of her population (particularly the poor) continue to be financial excluded. In recognition of this fact, the government of the Gambia considers the reduction of the financially excluded as one of her main goals for inclusive economic growth and development. This has culminated to promotion of mobile money financial services as means to include a bigger proportion of the population into the mainstream financial services. However, the ability of mobile money to catalyze financial inclusion in Gambia would be limited if uptake and use of the services is constraint by high monetary cost such as withdrawals fees. For this reason, studying whether subsidizing withdrawal fees could stimulate the adoption and use of the service is an important research undertaking. Thus, to study this issue, we intend to use a randomized field experiment where we randomly vary the cost of withdrawal charges among some randomly selected clients of Qodoo and then study how their adoption of the new offer and usage of their mobile money accounts varies across different withdrawal fees subsidy. The clients will be randomly assigned to one of three different withdrawals fees discount: 0%, 15% and 30%. After six months, we evaluate the impact of our intervention on account usage by looking at indicators such as total deposits, account balance, and monthly average transactions.

Members

Project leader: Hamidou Jawara

Project researchers: Fatoumata Singhateh | Lamin B Jammeh | Adama Touray

Scientific mentors: Guillermo Cruces

Policy outreach mentors: Bill McGill Jones

Journal publication

No journal publications.

Working Papers

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Information, Price, and Barriers to Adoption and Usage of Mobile Money Evidence from a Field Experiment in The Gambia	2020-02-28	913.69kB	0	0

Policy Briefs

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	How the cost of mobile money is hindering uptake in The Gambia	2020-02-20	362.68kB	0	0

Final report

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
		2019-07-08	734.33kB	0	1

Proposal

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Can discounted withdrawal fees catalyze mobile money usage? Field experimental Evidence from Gambia	2018-09-18	454.28kB	0	0