Motivation: Digital financial services (DFS) such as M-Pesa allow individuals to maintain financial privacy from partners or relatives. While many assume that this privacy empowers women by enabling independent resource control, it may also create conflict, reduce marital satisfaction, or provoke backlash. Evidence from Kenya [1] and other Sub-Saharan contexts [2] [3] suggests that women sometimes sacrifice income to hide resources, but little is known about how financial privacy functions within marriages. Kenya, with high DFS penetration and relatively high female labor force participation, is an ideal setting to explore these dynamics. This study builds on prior work to examine how couples perceive and value financial privacy, the household characteristics that shape demand for it, and its implications for women’s empowerment and relationship well-being.
Objective:
This project extends an ongoing lab experiment with couples from informal settlements in Nairobi to quantify the value of DFS-enabled financial privacy and to explore its effects on intra-household bargaining and women’s empowerment. Approximately 500 couples engage in three modules: (1) incentivized behavioral games measuring willingness to pay for privacy and resource allocation choices, (2) vignette-based experiments exploring norms, long-term perceptions, and hidden income scenarios, and (3) survey modules capturing savings, expenditures, digital finance use, and household dynamics. Outcomes include willingness to sacrifice money for privacy, reported emotions, marital quality indicators, and perceived empowerment. This design allows the identification of heterogeneity across cooperative and non-cooperative households, where the value and consequences of privacy may differ substantially. Additionally, the study captures both immediate trade-offs and long-term perceptions, offering a rigorous assessment of whether privacy strengthens or undermines women’s economic empowerment.
Proposed Impact:
The study will generate the first systematic evidence on how DFS-enabled financial privacy operates within marriages and when it strengthens—or undermines—women’s economic empowerment. Findings will inform the design of DFS products and policies that balance women’s autonomy with household well-being, contributing nuanced evidence to debates on digital finance and gender equity. Ultimately, the research will refine the global conversation on DFS as a pathway to women’s empowerment, demonstrating that privacy is neither universally empowering nor universally harmful, but deeply contingent on household context.
[1] Jakiela, P., & Ozier, O. (2016). Does Africa need a rotten kin theorem? Experimental evidence on village economies. The Review of Economic Studies, 83(1), 231–268
[2] Boltz, M., Marazyan, K., & Villar, P. (2019). Income hiding and informal redistribution: A lab-in-the-field experiment in Senegal. Journal of Development Economics, 137, 78–92.
[3] Barr, A., Dekker, M., Mwansa, F., & Zuze, T. L. (2020). Financial decision-making, gender and social norms in Zambia: Preliminary report on the quantitative data generation, analysis and results (CeDEx Discussion Paper Series No. 2020-06). The University of Nottingham, Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx).
Photo by David Iloba
