Smartphones are helping rural women get better at business

Soundaram Ramasamy, the only female bull-keeper in the farmlands of western Tamil Nadu, breeds Kangeyam bulls, an indigenous cattle breed named after the region and used for rural sports like jallikattu, bull racing and farming. Despite the Supreme Court ban on bull sport, interest in the Kangeyam breed is alive because of mass adoption of technology by her customer base to whom she Whatsapps pictures of the bulls along with price quotes and milk yield at her dairy unit in Kathasamipalayam village.
Ramasamy is just one among many women using mobile apps like KonguMadu (an online marketplace for jallikattu breeds) and social networks to increase their earnings.
And this impact of smartphones on agrarian women-driven businesses is being felt across sectors. In Kotagiri in the Nilgiris, women self-help group (SHG) members are using social media to market their chocolates, pastries, tea and spice goody bags in urban centres, and some of their posts have more than 3,000 likes. Darmona Tea Estate owner Dinesh Raju, who’s helped a lot of his female tea workers get part-time jobs with SHGs, says social media is helping them tap hitherto unexplored markets at no extra cost. Since the Nilgris has a high number of tourists, the gift hampers of candles/chocolates/fruit/fir cones that these women make prove popular for online sales.
Despite growing use, rural women are still far less mobile-savvy than urban counterparts. Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) data shows that in rural India, male-to-female internet use is far more skewed at 88:12 as compared to 62:38 in urban India. But among the few who bridged the divide are women entrepreneurs using mobile solutions like Vodafone Foundation’s RUDI Sandesha Vyavhar to sell farm produce to local communities.
RUDI Sandesha Vyavhar has benefited over 3,500 RUDIbens in Gujarat by helping them increase monthly sales and incomes, sometimes four-fold, according to a report by the Vodafone Foundation which has tied up with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) to develop a mobile app for rural women entrepreneurs to sell farm produce like pulses, wheat, and turmeric. Using this mobile app, women are able to place orders real-time, record sales and maintain sales reports and customer ledgers.
These small-scale businesswomen are catching up with the menfolk. IAMAI says internet penetration among rural females is growing at 61% and 79% among males. Unlike urban centres, internet use in rural areas is largely synonymous with mobiles and not so much with laptops, PCs, tablets and other devices.
For nearly a decade now, social dogma has restricted women’s access to mobile telephony. In some parts, khaps have issued decrees barring unmarried women from owning cellphones, seen as a symbol of promiscuity. Research conducted by GSMA, a trade body of mobile operators, shows that women in India are 36% less likely to own a mobile than men. The findings show that lack of address and ID proof among women, particularly migrant workers, is one of the many reasons they do not own mobiles. Cost is also a barrier because many are financially dependent on male-earning members of the household, and often have to borrow handsets.
In a 2014 Telenor India study in UP’s Aligarh district, a majority of men were found to have smartphones while women made do with basic phones. “While we associate mobiles with progress, a patriarchal mindset often associates cellphones in the hands of women with ‘evils’ in society,” says Sharad Mehrotra, CEO, Telenor India Communications. Telenor has been working to bridge this gap under Project Sampark: through street plays and door-to-door contact with families, female promoters explain the benefits of mobile connectivity to people. Currently running in parts of Western Uttar Pradesh, the project has helped provide livelihood opportunities to local women who work as promoters and brought over 75,000 rural subscribers into the mobile network.
Shrutam Desai, co-founder of Onlymobiles.com, which sells mobile phones to over 17,000 pin codes in India, says lack of education and familiarity with English has prevented mobile phones from reaching the last mile in the female segment. “However, more and more handset makers are coming up with local language-enabled handsets which should help,” says Desai.