Bringing mobile to more women
Vodafone is using mobile technology to enhance the quality of women’s lives.
We are committed to helping women take advantage of technology and the benefits it offers.
Through connectivity, we seek to support positive outcomes for women in education, skills and jobs, health and well-being, safety, and economic empowerment.
Communications technology plays an important role in empowering women in many of our markets to overcome everyday barriers and improve their lives and livelihoods. Mobile technology can enable access to essential services from maternal healthcare to agricultural information for smallholder women farmers.
Research indicates that women who have access to mobile internet via a smartphone have 9% higher levels of wellbeing than women who have access via a basic or feature phone.
Our progress
Mobile technology enhances many public and commercial services, from accessing vaccinations and maternal healthcare, to mobile banking and online support for smallholder farmers.
We are using our mobile technologies to enhance the quality of women’s lives through commercial programmes that:
Support education, skills and jobs
Improve health, wellbeing and safety
Enable economic empowerment
Focusing on creating relevant services for women is a key strategy to bring more women online, as an example, in many African markets gaining access to quality health information and antenatal care can be very difficult. Information delivered by mobile can help to bridge some of the gaps in crucial, basic information. Responding to this, our Mum & Baby service continues to grow, giving customers free access to maternal, neonatal and child health information in South Africa.
The service has over 2.3 million registered users in South Africa, helping parents and caregivers to take positive actions to improve their children’s health.
The increase of women in our customer base also makes good business sense; women have a higher Net Promoter Score (+4pp compared to men).
Our strategy in action
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Impact on UN Sustainable Development Goals
We aim to build a digital society that enhances socio-economic progress, embraces everyone and does not come at the cost of our planet. Through our connectivity, digital innovations and partnership we can accelerate and scale delivery across multiple SDGs.
