What?

Here is MFO’s latest post in our Garment Worker Diaries blog series on workerdiaries.org: Digital Wage Experience Revisited: What Have Women Workers Learned?

In May 2020 MFO and SANEM asked women garment workers in Bangladesh about their experiences with digital wage payments, and we asked them the same questions again in September. Because we are talking with the same workers each week, we are able to look at how the women workers switched their responses from May to September. In order to understand what women garment workers might have learned about digital finance, we matched up all the women who answered our questions in both months—457 in total.

This tactic is a little different for this week’s blog because we focus on a specific subset of our respondents to see how their behavior has changed over time. In addition to drilling down into the data we apply some demographic analysis, another new approach for this blog series. The analysis produces some very interesting correlations between education, age, and acquisition of digital skills. However, we note that further analysis is needed to see exactly which demographic variables might be at play.

Read the full post to get the whole story!

Since May 2020 MFO has been publishing a blog almost every week with updates from our Diaries interviews with 1,300 garment workers in Bangladesh. The blogs cover a wide variety of topics including:

• Wage digitization,
• Health of workers,
• Impact of Covid-19 on various aspects of their lives
• Financial tools

You can find a list of the blogs from May to September below. Also please visit our dashboard to take a deep dive into the data we have collected.

Wage payments and digitization

• Alleviating Digital Headaches
• Mixing it Up: The Co-existence of Cash and Digital Financial Services
• Gender and Wage Digitization
• Eid Bonus Payments
• Shift to Digital Wage Payments from April to May
• Who got paid in April

Health

• Health Checkup on Garment Workers  

Impact of Covid-19

• Migration and Remittances During Covid-19
• Two months in: the impact of Covid-19 on workers
• Three months in: back to work in the time of Covid-19
• Four months on and business as usual during Covid-19/
• Working Through the Pandemic, Five Months In
• Covid-19 Safety Measures in the Factories

Inside Garment Workers’ Households

• Another Look Inside Garment Workers Households, July 2020
• A Look Inside a Garment Worker’s Household, April to June 2020
• Household Gender Dynamics

Financial Tools

• The Cost of Credit
• An Analysis of Remittances

Branchless banking is the practice of providing banking services outside of traditional bank branches. This can include the use of smart cards combined with a point-of-sale or point-of-transaction device, mobile money agents, banking correspondents, and many other innovations that bring banking services closer to the consumer at a low cost.
To learn more about MFO’s work on Consumer Education for Branchless Banking (CEBB) click here

It is critical to understand consumer behaviour to tailor financial products and services to meet the money management needs of consumers, as well as tailoring financial education. MFO has a wide variety of methodologies for identifying the behaviour of low-income consumers including Financial Diaries and the Financial Capabilities Index.