Mobile phones, gender, and female empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa: studies with African youth

Gina Porter,Kate Hampshire,Albert Abane,Alister Munthali,Elsbeth Robson,Ariane De Lannoy,Augustine Tanle,Samuel Owusu

doi:10.1080/02681102.2019.1622500

Abstract

ABSTRACTData from qualitative and survey research with young people in 24 locations (urban and rural) across Ghana, Malawi, and South Africa expose the complex interplay between phone ownership and usage, female empowerment, and chronic poverty in Africa. We consider gendered patterns of phone ownership and use before examining practices of use in educational settings, in business and in romantic and sexual relationships. While some reshaping of everyday routines is evident, in the specific context of female empowerment we find little support within our sites for the concept of the mobile phone as an instrument of positive transformative change. The phone's application in romantic and sexual relationships demonstrates particularly strongly the way phones are complicit in constraining women's empowerment and points to potential wider repercussions, including for educational and entrepreneurship trajectories. Women's agency is still mired within wider structures of patriarchy and chronic poverty: existing inequalities are being re-inscribed and reinforced.

Highlights

The study of mobile phone usage exposes a plurality of sites where material systems are entwined with social relations and a complex interplay of structure and agency prevails (Wilson, 2016): nowhere is this better exhibited than through research with young people in subSaharan Africa
If we look to the areas where mobile phones have been perceived likely to be significant in the process of female empowerment among Africa’s poor, the focus tends towards the economic arena
Jobs are hard to find because the informal sector is so small and formal sector employment remains low for a range of structural reasons. Of those who had managed to set up their own business or were self-employed, in Ghana just 29% of women and 35% of men said that the phone had played a role in this process; comparable figures for Malawi were 8% women and 29% men. (Under 30 respondents were in this position in South Africa.) The statistically significant gender difference in Malawi is a likely factor of women’s very small scale of business and low phone ownership

Summary

Introduction

The study of mobile phone usage exposes a plurality of sites where material systems (and their failures) are entwined with social relations and a complex interplay of structure and agency prevails (Wilson, 2016): nowhere is this better exhibited than through research with young people in subSaharan Africa. Many women reported offers and purchase of mobile phones by boyfriends: Cindi, an unemployed but self-confident 24-year-old woman in remote rural South Africa was explicit about her requirement of gifts in exchange for sex: ‘I give you something, you give me something in return ...

Results

Conclusion