Digital inclusion has become a fundamental prerequisite for accessing the modern financial system and ensuring the effective delivery of essential governance services. India and other low- and middle-income countries have seen digital expansion at an enormous pace. However, the gender divide is glaring—in terms of mobile money account ownership, it stands at 56 percentage points (GSMA 2024 report). 3ie’s study, supported by the Gates Foundation, aims to understand women's inclusion in digital public infrastructure – specifically, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – and the factors that impact its adoption among them. Our research aims to help stakeholders understand the gaps and effective ways to close them.
Enabling women’s access to digital payments
Launched in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI has transformed the country’s payments landscape. It has grown in terms of both the volume and value of transactions. NPCI’s ‘UPI For Her’ initiative shows that India has 200 million women who are ready to embrace digital payments. We are focusing on UPI adoption, particularly in low-income and marginalized communities, to generate policy-relevant findings that will facilitate easy and seamless access to UPI among women.
Our approach to collecting data: 3ie’s mixed-methods study aims to provide policy-oriented actionable findings to inform systemic change across the design and delivery of UPI services. In the first phase, we identified several key themes that emerged from our literature review, analysis of secondary data and interviews with key stakeholders. These themes include affordability, accessibility, digital and financial literacy, relevance or perceived utility, safety, and norms. We are now delving deeply into these thematic areas through our quantitative and qualitative surveys to understand the nuances that influence how women perceive UPI and its benefits, as well as what factors encourage their usage of and trust in a platform for transactions.
Our survey aims to collect gender-disaggregated data on users to understand their preferences and the challenges they face in using these platforms. It will also focus on understanding challenges across the user journey in the platform and potential ways in which it can be adapted to the specific needs of women users.
Partnering for community-level insights
We have crucial insights from our engagements with stakeholders in the government, research organizations and private institutions. Our first field-level partnership in this study is with Yugantar, an NGO that trains women in conducting digital transactions. The focus of this collaboration is to gain community-level insights and understand the enablers and barriers to women’s uptake of UPI in Telangana. We are working on similar partnerships in other key states to generate effectiveness evidence and build a comprehensive understanding of what works.
Please write to dpandey[at]3ieimpact[dot]org if you are working on women’s uptake of UPI and would like to connect with us. You can find more information on our project webpage here.
