Can goal setting help women in India use digital saving services more?

Abstract

Financial participation within households serves as an important indicator of women’s economic empowerment. While previous studies have explored household finances and savings, digital savings via online or mobile channels have been overlooked. This study looks to shed light here, particularly around goal setting as a process towards saving in women. We used semi-structured in-depth interviews (IDIs) and focus group discussions (FGDs) to explore topics like savings patterns, digital finance adoption, mental accounting, money allocation, expenses, and agency. Each FGD had 3-5 participants, encouraging dialogue about savings behaviors, approaches, barriers, strategies, and financial decision-making dynamics within their households. We also performed mindmapping where we asked participants to write out the distribution of their household income in size bubbles and flowcharts around which we developed our follow up conversations to gain insight on our target group.