A research conducted by Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) on Ghanaian rural women trader’s cognitive understanding and perception of mobile phones and money system has revealed key insights on mobile technology.

Mobile technology has helped financial institution reach the rural, under-served population and the traders have benefited with increased profits however, more education and communication infrastructure improvements are needed to achieve higher penetration.

These are some of the key findings of the research:

• 77% of the traders are mobile phone users and have been using for a period between 1 to 5 years

• Poor network connectivity is the biggest challenge for traders

• 82% of the traders are unaware of the existence of mobile money or its perceived risks

• Mobile money systems remain largely unknown to the traders due to the lack of communication infrastructure to support efficient money transfer

• Only 2% of the traders use mobile money and their use is only limited to sending/receiving of money to schools, relatives but not for trade

• Traders use their mobile phones as an easier and cheaper means of communication to setup meeting arrangement and discuss price

• Traders profits increased as a result of reduced cost and time on traveling

Read the full article written by IMTFI researchers Dennis Chirawurah, Deborah Elzie, and Seidu Al-hassan published on IMTFI here.

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