A survey conducted by Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA) to assess the extent to which men and women in rural and urban communities are taking advantage of e-government services – public digital and electronic platforms, has revealed that women patronage is very low.
This report assesses the extent to which women, as economic agents or lead contributors to household incomes in Ghana access and use digital government services via mobile platforms (especially mobile money) for business, family and personal needs, and the opportunities available to foster inclusive delivery of public services for women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment.
According to the survey, factors leading to the low usage of the services include affordability, low awareness of e-government services and knowledge on its use, safety and security, poor network or slow connections, among others.
Although a lot of e-government services are available, low awareness has prevented large-scale adoption, as well as high cost of mobile devices and inadequate digital skills contribute to the digital gender divide, the survey noted.
The launch of the survey took place during a quarterly knowledge forum organized by the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications in partnership with GSMA. Discussions centred on the theme ‘digital public services for all: understanding Ghana’s opportunity to leverage mobile money for inclusive service delivery’.
The forum also focused on enhancing telecoms and technology insights and contributing to policy, legislation, and regulation in the country, and again promoting gender equality and women’s financial inclusion through digital public services.
The Chief Executive Officer for Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey, mentioned that achieving inclusive e-government services require unwavering commitment and collaborative action.
He added: “It is our collective responsibility as government entities, civil society organisations, private sector actors, and individuals to help implement the recommendations put forth in this report. We at the chamber are grateful for the partnership with the GSMA and we would continue to work with them and our members to actualise their vision to unlock full power of connectivity so that people, industry, and society will thrive.
A multi-stage stratified cluster sampling procedure was adopted for a random selection of three districts in Greater Accra, Ashanti and the Northern regions.
These selected three communities from each of the chosen districts in the given regions, containing micro small medium enterprises (MSMEs) women and men led contributors to household income, making a total of nine clusters.
Respondents were selected using a random Probability-Proportional to-size sampling procedure based on regional, district, and community population size distributions from the most recent Ghana Living Standards Survey
A structured electronic questionnaire, designed in English and translated into four local languages – Twi, Ga, Dagbani, Gonja and Kasem, was administered to respondents.
Recommendations
The Senior Insights Manager at GSMA, Nigham Shahid, said cooperation between public and private sector actors was recommended to help address demand and supply side barriers affecting women’s adoption of e-government services.
The study advocated that the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation in partnership with Ministry of Finance, development partners and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) should provide funding and technical advisory and implementation support to Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communication (GIFEC) to speed up the nationwide rural telephony and digital infrastructure development improvement project.
“The Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation through National Information Technology Agency (NITA) should develop and implement comprehensive awareness campaigns in partnership with the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), and community leaders/ organisations to educate the public about the availability, benefits, and usage of e-government services.
“Government institutions providing e-services should clearly communicate to users the steps involved in the delivery of such e- services and provide real-time status updates, allowing users to track the progress of their online requests and understand the next steps required,” it added.
It concluded that e-government service providers should mandate designers of e-government apps to develop ‘data-light’ versions to help reduce internet costs for more price sensitive users.
