Nice article and the analysis—mostly really matches up with my experience, especially that mobile money usage can increase healthcare access as we’ve seen that in our facilities with mobile money available close by.
Our small OneDay Health survey in remote places showed that out of 170 households surveyed, only one didn’t have at lest 1 active cellphone within the famliy unit. Obviously many (maybe even the majority) of members within that family wouldn’t have a cellphone, but I would imagine this comment..
“GiveDirectly gives those who don’t already have a mobile phone the option to buy one, subtracting the ~$15 cost from their first transfer, an offer taken by 90% of recipients”
...doesn’t necessarily mean that 90% of recipients don’t have cellphones (many of them would have had one already), but more that they were willing to spend that $15 they hadn’t received yet on a cellphone? Not sure about this though. Or does that 90% figure only include those who don’t have a cellphone already?
We also gave 15 nurses smartphones once as a trial, and over half of them were broken or lost within a year—to be honest I’m impressed that half of them were still there after 2 years time! I also wanted to read that article but your link didn’t work it would be great if you could fix that!
Thanks, very interesting insights re: healthcare access (you’d enjoy this pod with our research director who is a former medical doctor). The ~$15 is at market value for a phone, so the incentive isn’t especially appealing. That said, sometimes other members of a household will have a phone but the assigned recipient does not so elects to buy one.
Nice article and the analysis—mostly really matches up with my experience, especially that mobile money usage can increase healthcare access as we’ve seen that in our facilities with mobile money available close by.
Our small OneDay Health survey in remote places showed that out of 170 households surveyed, only one didn’t have at lest 1 active cellphone within the famliy unit. Obviously many (maybe even the majority) of members within that family wouldn’t have a cellphone, but I would imagine this comment..
“GiveDirectly gives those who don’t already have a mobile phone the option to buy one, subtracting the ~$15 cost from their first transfer, an offer taken by 90% of recipients”
...doesn’t necessarily mean that 90% of recipients don’t have cellphones (many of them would have had one already), but more that they were willing to spend that $15 they hadn’t received yet on a cellphone? Not sure about this though. Or does that 90% figure only include those who don’t have a cellphone already?
We also gave 15 nurses smartphones once as a trial, and over half of them were broken or lost within a year—to be honest I’m impressed that half of them were still there after 2 years time! I also wanted to read that article but your link didn’t work it would be great if you could fix that!
Thanks, very interesting insights re: healthcare access (you’d enjoy this pod with our research director who is a former medical doctor). The ~$15 is at market value for a phone, so the incentive isn’t especially appealing. That said, sometimes other members of a household will have a phone but the assigned recipient does not so elects to buy one.
Here’s the link in question: https://www.fsdafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/YEG-Brochure-29.10.21.pdf