Who Really Uses Her Mobile Money Account?

In rural Ghana, a woman's economic life begins long before the sun reaches the market square. She processes gari (a staple food made from fermented, dried cassava) for sale, trades dried fish at the roadside, and manages the household ledger that no one writes down but everyone depends on. Her hard work sustains the local economy and her community.

And yet, the single most powerful financial tool to enter these communities in a generation – mobile money – has largely passed her by. 

Statistically, the Global Findex Database reports 81% financial inclusion in Ghana – 84% for men, and 78% for women. It is a celebrated figure. Behind it, however, inclusion for the rural woman is an almost perfect illusion – present in every dataset, yet absent from her daily life.

The precarious arrangement of proxy trust

During my recent doctoral research – a qualitative, interpretive study examining how trust shapes mobile money access and agency among rural women in Ghana – I conducted in-depth interviews and observations with 30 mobile money users in three communities spanning peri-urban to deep rural. What I observed was not a story of exclusion in the traditional sense. These women had accounts. They had transaction histories. By every metric the financial inclusion community uses to measure progress, they were fully included.

But not one of them had ever touched the interface.

While men generally operated mobile money directly, the women I interviewed were largely dependent on an intermediary to complete even the simplest transaction: a husband, a daughter, a neighbor or a local agent.  One woman described her arrangement with quiet precision: "My husband sends money; I follow instructions." The account bore her name and her identity, but the decisions were never hers.

When a woman is forced to rely on an intermediary to navigate the digital interface, two critical problems immediately arise. First, she loses true financial control. She cannot make independent spending or saving decisions, reducing her to a passive participant in her own account. Second, and more gravely, this arrangement severely increases her vulnerability. A woman who must hand her PIN to someone else is more exposed to fraud and exploitation than someone who was never registered at all.

I call this precarious arrangement proxy trust: trust placed not in the mobile money system itself, but in the human being standing between the vulnerable user and the technology. Inclusion without control is not inclusion. It is a risk transferred to the person least equipped to bear it.

The illusion of inclusion

Hajia, a porridge seller in Egyam, was scammed through exactly this vulnerability. She lost her savings, attempted to report it, and was "tossed here and there" until she gave up. Her local agent had also been scammed and shut down entirely. Hajia now keeps cash on her person, and she no longer accesses the digital economy at all. She is, of course, still counted as financially included.

Conversely, it is vital to observe how women innovate around the system's limitations and participate in ways that are not counted. In one community, three market women, none of whom can read, created a cooperative purchasing arrangement. Unable to navigate the mobile money menu, they rely on a trusted susu collector who comes around to collect their physical cash and manage it in a single digital account. Through this collective proxy, they pool funds, rotate buying trips to the city, and share transport costs they could no longer afford individually. This is true financial inclusion generating real economic growth. Yet, because it relies on human infrastructure rather than independent digital usage, it remains invisible in our national datasets.

A system designed for men

Mobile money currently operates on the assumption that a user owns a phone, can read a USSD menu and transacts independently. In rural Ghana, that profile fits almost exclusively the male experience. 

With mobile money, the person who controls the device controls the finances. And in rural households, this is mostly men. One man I interviewed routes his business income entirely to his wife's account to keep it separate from his own account. The phone is registered in her name, but he makes every spending decision. Another man I interviewed bets on sporting events through mobile money specifically because his wife cannot spot digital transactions the way she spotted paper betting slips. The same technology that affords men financial autonomy provides the opposite for women, trapping them into financial dependence. 

The system measures registration, not control. It met these women at the point of sign-up and never inquired whether they possessed the digital literacy to actually use the service.

Three recommendations for true inclusion

The evidence from these communities points to three specific interventions that would make an immediate difference.

1. Measure proxy-dependent users separately and by gender. Ghana's next National Financial Inclusion and Development Strategy should introduce one question into demand-side surveys: Did you personally complete this transaction, or did someone do it for you? That single data point would make a hidden population visible. Importantly, this question must be disaggregated by gender. 
2. Design for the intermediary relationship. A confirmation voice callback in a local dialect directed to the account holder's number after each transaction would allow her to verify what occurred without navigating a text-based interface herself.
3. Treat agent accountability as a women's protection issue. When an agent disappears or is defrauded, dependent women have nowhere to turn. Licensing frameworks must require handover protocols that protect these specific, vulnerable users.

True financial inclusion is not achieved by merely registering rural women for mobile money accounts. It must extend beyond access to control, ensuring women have real ownership and agency over their financial lives. Until the system is designed for the woman who has never touched the interface, inclusion will remain an illusion: a statistic on a strategy document, rather than a reality for the women who rise before dawn to sustain their communities.