Family Farming Knowledge Platform

Use of mobile phones by the rural poor

Gender perspectives from selected Asian countries

The two studies in this report explore these issues further using empirical quantitative surveys as well as qualitative fieldwork from a cross-section of developing economies in South and SouthEast Asia. The first study is an empirical investigation of the digital gender divide amongst the poor (broadly called the Bottom of the economic Pyramid) from urban and rural perspectives. The study uses a six-country dataset from 2011 that tried to understand mobile phone access and use at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). The Tele use at the Bottom of the Pyramid 4 (Teleuse@ BOP4) study was conducted in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand and is representative of BOP tele users. The study finds that despite mobile phone ownership being greater amongst urban dwellers when compared to rural dwellers, location is not a statistically significant predictor of ownership. This was the case for five of the six study countries, with the exception being Indonesia (Java only) where mobile phone ownership amongst urbanites was found to be 66.9% more likely than amongst rural dwellers.

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Publisher: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
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Organization: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
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Year: 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55250-589-2
Country/ies: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand
Geographical coverage: Asia and the Pacific
Type: Book
Full text available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5477e.pdf
Content language: English
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