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on Community banking and credit unions |
| By: | Wasti, Hiba Syeda Asad |
| Abstract: | Women’s entrepreneurship in Pakistan is shaped by intersecting social, institutional, and economic constraints, including gender norms, household bargaining structures, mobility restrictions, limited access to finance, unequal digital access, and low participation in formal labor markets. As digital platforms, mobile payments, social commerce, and online marketplaces expand across emerging economies, they create new opportunities for women’s enterprise participation while also reproducing existing inequalities in skills, visibility, trust, and institutional support. This paper reviews social-science literature on women’s economic agency, entrepreneurship, digital inclusion, and gendered labor-market barriers, using Pakistan as a country case. Rather than treating digital market access only as a business-growth opportunity, the paper examines how digital access interacts with social norms, family expectations, market institutions, and women’s ability to exercise economic choice. The paper proposes a conceptual framework linking five dimensions of women’s enterprise participation: digital capability, financial inclusion, market access, social legitimacy, and institutional trust. It argues that women-led enterprise development in Pakistan requires attention not only to platforms and markets but also to the social conditions that shape women’s agency, mobility, and legitimacy as economic actors. |
| Date: | 2026–07–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:5azn2_v2 |
| By: | Emmanuel Nahimana; Ya\'e Ulrich Gaba |
| Abstract: | Mobile money has widened financial access across Sub-Saharan Africa and enlarged the surface for money-laundering and terrorism-financing (ML/TF) activity in ecosystems dominated by high-volume, low-value transactions. Rwanda is a case in point: several million active mobile-money users, telecom-led wallets on the MTN and Airtel networks, and a Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) supervising transaction streams whose scale exceeds static rule-based monitoring. This paper develops and evaluates a transaction-monitoring framework aligned to the Rwandan AML/CFT regime under (i) extreme class imbalance (~0.1% prevalence), (ii) scarce and delayed labels, and (iii) bounded investigator capacity. Using SAML-D, a synthetic dataset of 9, 504, 852 transactions with 17 laundering typologies, we engineer account-centric behavioural features (rolling velocity, net-flow directionality, counterparty diversity, burstiness) and benchmark supervised classifiers (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, LightGBM), unsupervised anomaly detectors (Isolation Forest, Local Outlier Factor), a dense autoencoder, and a late-fusion meta-learner. Evaluation is operational: PR-AUC, recall at a calibrated ~90%-precision point, recall at top-K%, and alerts per 10, 000. On the chronologically held-out test period, LightGBM attains PR-AUC = 0.0469, capturing 64 laundering cases at precision ~0.89 with 0.51 alerts per 10, 000; the fusion stacker reaches PR-AUC = 0.0477 at precision ~0.91 and 0.46 alerts per 10, 000, recovering 59 true positives. We map score bands to Rwanda-relevant analyst workflows and STR/SAR escalation, and outline a staged path from synthetic prototyping to real-data validation with the National Bank of Rwanda and FIC. The contribution is operational: a governance-aware pipeline and evaluation protocol calibrated to the constraints of an African mobile-money regulator, not a new algorithm. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.15447 |
| By: | Pattnaik, Subhransu; Kramer, Berber; Ward, Patrick |
| Abstract: | Digital credit has emerged as a promising tool for addressing liquidity constraints among smallholder farmers, yet evidence on its longer-term effects on agricultural investment and production remains limited. This paper examines how access to digital agricultural credit shapes farmers’ investment decision and production outcomes over time using a two-phase cluster randomized intervention implemented in Odisha, India. We combine difference-in-differences, and staggered treatment estimators to assess how impacts evolve over years. We found limited evidence of immediate increases in aggregate agricultural input expenditure and durable asset accumulation. In contrast, we find robust evidence of positive effects on agricultural production among existing producers. Taken together, the findings indicate that digital credit primarily operates by relaxing liquidity constraints and improving the productivity of existing farming operations rather than inducing new entry into agriculture or triggering immediate capital deepening. The results highlight the importance of distinguishing between short-run and long-run responses to financial interventions and suggest that agricultural investment is dynamic nature and can take time to materialize. |
| Keywords: | Agricultural Finance, Farm Management |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea26:404346 |
| By: | Maredia, Mywish K.; Olubunmi, Adefemi; Olabisi, Michael |
| Abstract: | This paper examines gender disparities in mobile technology access and productive use along Nigeria’s cowpea value chain using a nationally representative survey of nearly 19, 000 value chain actors, including farmers, assemblers, wholesalers, and retailers. While gender gaps in basic mobile phone ownership are relatively modest, substantially larger gaps emerge in smartphone ownership and, more importantly, in business-oriented use of mobile technologies. Women are significantly less likely than men to use phones for making or receiving business orders, particularly through app-based or data-intensive platforms, even when they own mobile devices. The findings provide evidence of a “second-level digital divide, ” where access to technology does not translate into equivalent economic engagement. The analysis further shows that these disparities vary across value chain segments and regions, reflecting differences in market integration, commercialization, and gender norms. The study highlights the importance of moving beyond access-based measures of digital inclusion and emphasizes the need for policies that strengthen women’s digital skills, institutional support, and productive use of technology in agricultural markets. |
| Keywords: | International Development |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea26:404646 |
| By: | Mackett, Odile |
| Abstract: | Studies of inequality have become more popular in recent decades as the incidence of inequality and its consequences have become problematised. Alongside these studies, an interest in time use and temporal inequalities have also grown. Time use studies have primarily focussed on women’s unpaid work, specifically as debates about the care economy, and the growing care crisis accompanied by population ageing have entered policy debates. Time and its availability is embedded in every process of our lives, having important implications for economic outcomes, social interactions, health status, and the resources we have with which to mediate these outcomes. Time thus acts as a master variable that connects phenomena usually treated as separate, such as health, fertility, wealth, accumulation and environmental degradation. This paper develops a multidimensional framework for analysing temporal inequality built around three dimensions: temporal resources (time poverty), temporal autonomy (time dispossession), and temporal horizons (time foreshortening). While existing concepts such as time poverty capture important aspects of temporal inequality they provide only a partial understanding of how temporal resources, autonomy and future horizons are structured. The framework is illustrated through examples drawn from social reproduction and the care economy, demonstrating how temporal inequalities shape outcomes across health, work and wellbeing. The paper highlights that understanding temporal inequalities requires attention not only to how much time individuals possess, but also to who controls that time and whose present time can be converted into future security, wellbeing and accumulation. |
| Date: | 2026–07–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:uewfr_v1 |