The question seems straightforward: if women lack access to digital financial services, shouldn’t giving them smartphones and mobile wallets solve the problem? This intuitive logic drives development programs worldwide. Yet, emerging evidence suggests the answer is far more complex.
From July 2-3, 2025, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners gathered in Accra, Ghana, for the Access to Agency: Empowering Women through Digital Inclusion conference, hosted by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). The two-day event brought together nearly 200 participants in person and many more online to examine a question critical to women’s economic empowerment: even when women gain access to phones, mobile wallets, or the internet: why does genuine empowerment so often remain out of reach?
The answer, as participants explored across sessions and studies, lies in the gap between access—owning or using a phone, a mobile wallet, or the internet—and agency, defined here as women’s ability to make and act on meaningful choices using those tools.
So, what does it take for digital access to translate to genuine agency for women? While access to technology is essential, it is not sufficient; digital tools contribute to women’s empowerment only when paired with skills, supportive environments, and opportunities to exercise decision-making power.
Measuring Empowerment: Why Definitions Matter
The challenge begins with how women’s economic empowerment is conceptualised and measured. Scott Graham, presenting findings from Adapting and Validating WEE Indicators in an Experimental Study of Savings, underscored that how we define and measure empowerment shapes our understanding of progress. His study focused on developing and validating context-specific indicators of women’s economic empowerment in rural Uganda. Graham highlighted the importance of grounding measurement frameworks in the local context to best capture nuanced shifts in agency, ensuring that indicators resonate with women’s actual experiences, rather than imposing external definitions.
Other presentations reinforced this point from different angles. Kalyani Raghunathan’s work emphasised that empowerment is multidimensional and cannot be reduced to income or work force participation alone. Frameworks like the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and the newer Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMENSS) provide ways to assess decision-making power, resource control, and agency at scale. Together, these studies underscored that measuring empowerment can require both standardised tools for comparability and context-specific indicators that reflect women’s lived realities.
Beyond the Device: Why Access Alone Falls Short
If measurement frames how we understand empowerment, Dean Karlan reminded participants in his keynote that program design determines whether empowerment is actually achieved. “Merely including women in existing initiatives does not lead to meaningful empowerment,” he added. Globally, 2.4 billion women still face unequal economic rights, underscoring the scale of the challenge.
Research presented by Philip Roessler in Improving Women’s Economic Empowerment through Mobile Phones and Training in Malawi and Simone Schaner in Pathways to Women Empowerment through Smartphone-Enabled Digital Finance echoed this finding: even when women own smartphones or are registered for digital financial services, many lack the decision-making authority or digital literacy to use them meaningfully.
Amnesty LeFevre and Mayank Date, in their study Optimizing Measurement of Women’s Access to and Use of Technology in Mobile-First Populations, introduced the Digital Access and Use (DAU) Index. In one study site, 70% of women who owned a phone still depended on others to perform mobile money transactions—a striking reminder that device ownership does not automatically translate into digital inclusion in the absence of autonomy and technological literacy.
Designing for Women’s Realities
Digital tools themselves often fail women because they are not built with women’s constraints in mind. As Marieme Esther Dassanou expressed in her keynote, “Design must start with her, keep her at the center, and end with her.”
This principle was illustrated in multiple contexts. Victor Kolo’s Empowering Women Domestic Workers: Qualitative Investigation on the Impact of DFS on Women’s Economic Empowerment in Nigeria showed that although mobile phone ownership is common in southwest Nigeria, women’s digital financial inclusion remains limited. Where accessible, low-cost mobile banking offered privacy and a sense of independence, but the research emphasised that true empowerment also requires sector formalisation, DFS literacy, cybersecurity awareness, and stronger ICT infrastructure.
Similarly, Samyuktha Kannan’s Leveraging Digital Technology to Make Crop Insurance More Accessible to Women: The Effects of Flexible Payment Schedules on Women’s Uptake and Bargaining Power found that nearly 90% of women farmers preferred customisable, flexible crop insurance payments, with uptake especially high among less financially empowered women. Designing financial products around women’s realities proved essential for meaningful empowerment.
Building Skills and Overcoming Barriers
Conference discussions made clear that access to devices must be paired with support structures that help women translate technology into real gains.
Caroline Wainana’s Digital Finance, Women’s Empowerment & Maternal Mental Health in Kenya found that mobile financial services alone were not associated with improvements in women’s wellbeing. Gains emerged only when programs paired DFS with peer support groups and community-based education.
Matthew Bird’s Interactive Mobile Games & Fraud Prevention showed how design tailored to women’s realities can make a difference: interactive, user-centered games significantly outperformed generic awareness materials in building fraud awareness, improving knowledge retention, and shifting behaviour. His study underscored that when tools are engaging, context-specific, and designed with women in mind, they can strengthen confidence and safety in digital spaces.
Even with well-designed tools and training, persistent gender norms and household dynamics continue to limit women’s use of technology. As shown in Pathways to Women Empowerment through Smartphone-Enabled Digital Finance, Simone Schaner asserted that simply providing phones was not enough. Women’s engagement was often mediated — or restricted — by male household members, underscoring the need for complementary support such as training and context-specific design to ensure meaningful digital empowerment.
Elijah Kipchumba’s Digital Finance and Intra-Household Decision-Making: Evidence from Mobile Money Use in Kenya reinforced this finding: while mobile money offered women privacy, it did not automatically give them greater decision-making power within households. This suggests that if digital finance is to strengthen women’s agency, programs must go beyond individual access to also address household-level dynamics and norms.
Discussions on women’s participation in gig work—presented by Rico Bergemann and Terry Muthahhari through Women in Gig Platform Driving: Descriptive Evidence from India and Indonesia—revealed further barriers: mobility restrictions, networking gaps, and expectations around domestic responsibilities continue to constrain women’s digital opportunities, especially for married women. The findings point to the importance of complementary measures such as safe transport, childcare support, and professional networks to enable women to participate more fully in digital labor markets.
Safety, Privacy, and Trust in Digital Spaces
Empowerment also depends on women’s sense of safety and trust when engaging digitally.
In her inaugural remarks, Madam Sabia Aku Kpekata, speaking on behalf of Ghana’s Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, noted that digital spaces expose women to fraud, harassment, and abuse, particularly in informal economies. She highlighted Ghana’s establishment of a National Cyber Security Centre, the 2024 Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Act 1121, and the ongoing review of the National Gender Policy to ensure gender-sensitive safeguards in ICT use.
Francis Annan’s Gender and Financial Misconduct in Mobile Money found that about 25% of mobile money users in the sample survey experience overcharging, with female agents more likely to overcharge female customers—showing that gender bias can cut in unexpected ways.
Munshi Sulaiman’s Digital Cash Transfers, Privacy & Women’s Empowerment in Uganda added nuance, showing that while mobile money transfers enhanced women’s autonomy, cash transfers were linked to a greater reduction in intimate partner violence. The findings suggest trade-offs with regard to these two modalities and reinforce the need to integrate consumer protection and safety measures into DFS design.
Towards Integrated, Context-Driven Solutions
Taken together, the research and dialogue from Accra made one point inescapable: there is no one-size-fits-all path to women’s digital empowerment.
As the conference takeaways are summarised:
- Access does not mean agency.
- Integrated solutions— combining technology, training, user-centered design, and structural change—work best.
- Context matters: interventions must reflect women’s lived realities.
- Training is crucial: building women’s digital and financial skills can lead to lasting gains.
As Ernest Aryeetey reminded participants in his keynote, research and policy must start from communities’ own definitions of empowerment and success, not just donor benchmarks.
Digital inclusion can open extraordinary opportunities for women — but only if it equips them with choice, knowledge, and control. As the conversations in Accra made clear, the future of digital empowerment will not be shaped by devices alone, but by the ecosystems built around them. Access may open the door, but agency is what allows women to walk through it on their own terms.
📌 This article highlights only a subset of studies and discussions from the Access to Agency Conference. For the full agenda, list of speakers, and session recordings, click here.
