Accelerating Women's Financial Inclusion
We're leveraging Myanmar's Smartphone Revolution and local women's networks to bridge the gender gap and empower women
in the formal economy.
Mobilizing Myanmar
A Smartphone Revolution Connects
Women With Economic Opportunity
Copyright © 2016-20 Paula Bock
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and philanthropic investors, Mobilizing Myanmar is currently conducting a large pilot project in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta.
In wet markets, bamboo homes and village gatherings, women are training women to safely and effectively use mobile financial services to break the cycle of poverty.
Because Myanmar has extensive network coverage, pervasive smartphone usage (even among the poor), and progressive regulations, it is an ideal lab environment to test innovations and demonstrate how unbanked women can empower themselves using digital tools.
We look forward to learning and sharing best practices widely in order to advance women's financial inclusion in the ASEAN region and beyond.
What We Do
Mobilizing Myanmar empowers women to lift themselves out of poverty using the smartphone technology that's already in their hands.
Why
Myanmar?
Though Myanmar is the poorest country in Southeast Asia with the least developed financial system, it has leapfrogged most nations around the globe in mobile phone and internet usage.
Most people in Myanmar have jumped straight to smartphones.
Copyright © 2019 Paula Bock
Why Women?
Copyright © 2019 Paula Bock
On the surface, mobile money is about technology and apps.
But at its core, in a nation where 38 percent of the population lives below the global poverty line, it's about transformation of society as women escape poverty, safely earn and save money, network with each other and gain power.
It's about changing social norms.
