Abstract
Gender bias, COVID-19 and the mobile Internet are among the most pressing issues of the day in the Global South. And while they are too often discussed in isolation from one another, in fact they exhibit multiple causalities, which need to be taken into account, in making policy towards any of them. More specifically, this chapter considers not only the direct effects of the mobile Internet on gender and the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the reverse effects of the two latter phenomena on the former.
I begin with the direct causalities where the effects of mobile Internet are felt on the incidence and severity of COVID-19 and deal thereafter with the relationships that run in the opposite direction. The final section is concerned with the policy implications of my findings.
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Notes
- 1.
Over LMICs as a whole, an extra 112 million women began using mobile Internet in 2020. This increase was made up heavily by women in South Asia, with 45 million new women users (GSMA 2021).
- 2.
These characteristics could perhaps best be described as ‘inessential’ from the point of view of those with low incomes in the LMICs.
- 3.
This was important because Mozilla employees would have been well versed in open-source software, including its own Firefox brand.
- 4.
Note that even from the end of 2019, KaiOS-based phones were available for about US$28 in seven African and Middle-East countries. Since then the phones have spread much more widely across the region (Techeconomy 2019).
- 5.
Gilbert (2019).
- 6.
What one might have expected is that poor people would use the Internet most on development-oriented uses such as gathering information on health, government services and business-related activities (James 2021). For there are few who doubt the primacy of escaping from the dire circumstances that define much poverty in the Global South.
- 7.
For the disbursements, note that the government relied on four mobile money providers. Note too that the government had, by 2020, reached over more than two million beneficiaries. The conclusion drawn by the GSMA is that ‘By leveraging mobile money and responding quickly to international emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, governments can support greater financial inclusion and prevent more people from falling into poverty. In the long term, responsible government action through digital payments could be crucial to bringing the world’s most financially excluded populations into the financial system’ (GSMA 2021, p. 35).
- 8.
For a full discussion see Hammond et al. (2020).
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James, J. (2022). Gender, Mobile Internet and COVID-19 in the Global South: Multiple Causalities. In: Gender, Internet Use, and Covid-19 in the Global South. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15576-5_4
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