The Impact of Mobile Money on Poor Rural Households: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

Christina Wieser, Miriam Bruhn, Johannes Philipp Kinzinger, Christian Simon Ruckteschler and Soren Heitmann

No 8913, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of rolling out mobile money agents in rural Northern Uganda. In a randomized experiment, 168 areas were randomly selected to receive an agent in 2017, with another 163 areas serving as a control group. Administrative data on mobile money transactions suggest that the agent rollout increased the probability of sending and receiving peer-to-peer transfers. Data from a 2018 survey of more than 4,500 households show that the agent rollout led to cost-savings for remittance transactions. It also doubled the nonfarm self-employment rate, from 3.4 to 6.4 percent, and reduced the fraction of households with very low food security from 62.9 to 47.2 percent, in areas far from a bank branch. The analysis finds no effect on savings, agricultural outcomes, or poverty. Overall, the findings add new evidence that mobile money can improve livelihoods even in poor and remote settings.

Keywords: ICT Economics; Inequality; Employment and Unemployment; Transport Services; Nutrition; Food Security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-exp, nep-ict, nep-mfd and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/13434156 ... ence-from-Uganda.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8913

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().