Paper Session: From ICT to Impact?
The Bank Account is not Enough: Examining Strategies for Financial Inclusion in India
Olga Morawczynski, David Hutchful, Nimmy Rangaswamy, Edward Cutrell
ICTs have been very successful at extending financial and transactional services.
NREGA is an Idian programme that guarantees 100 days of paid work, a payment that requires bank accounts, and which has raised the demand for them, and thus the need to manage them.
Notwithstanding, there is low usage of bank accounts, where 3/4 of them have almost no money and 1/5 are dormant / show no periodical movements.
Why is it so? A survey was performed to find the financial habits, the financial literacy and the technology-related issues with bank usage.
Usage was high among the high and middle earning groups. These informants exhibited the highest levels of financial literacy (while others e.g. were afraid of losing their money if put in the bank). They also used a more diverse set of financial instruments.
Usage was low among the low earning and NREGA dependent groups. These informants exhibited the lower levels of financial literacy. They also used a less diverse set of financial instruments.
Usage was higher among low earning informants who knew both services were available. These informants also had a more diverse portfolio than those who only knew about the disbursement service.
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: did you control for the way people got their income (in kind, cash, transfer…)? A: In a first interview, people that had no interest (personal or objective) in banking were detected and separated from the rest of the interviewees. This project is aimed at people that potentially could benefit from a more intensive use of banking according to their profiles. Amongts those, though, there did not seem to be a major difference between the ways of getting the income and financial literacy, but on the exposure to financial information.
Understanding the Links Between ICT skills Training and Employability: An Analytical Framework
Maria Garrido, Joe Sullivan, Andrew Gordon
Understand the relationship between basic ICT skills training and employability; map the different roles that NGOs play in workforce development; build an analytical framework.
For 4 years 10 studies have been performed in 30 countries on a variety of NGO ICT training programmes.
Enter the employability factor: Employability helps us understand dynamic beyond jobs, the fact that you have greater skills may not translate into a job.
Narrowing the topic to immigrant women, ICT training and employability in the European Union. Women are migrating in greater numbers for the purpose of finding jobs. They account for more than 50% of the immigrant population in most European countries. They have double disadvantage in the labour market: as women and as migrants. Computer literacy is one of the assets that may make a change.
Interviews with women that had and had not taken part of ICT training in European NGOs. NGO traning matters: digital competences for immigrant women who did not participate in NGO training are lower. ICT training can encourage further training in other skills. Immigrant women with advanced skills are less likely to be unemployed, though no correlation between ICT skill level and employment status for women with non, basic or intermediate skills. The social space created b the training helped them to diversify their social networks.
Barriers: country of origin is a strong determinant of future sector of employment in host country, well above educational level. It is very difficult to get out of the socio-economic circle that the immigrant lands on when hitting the host country.
ICT skills training en employability framework:
- NGO factors: organizational characteristics; training programme characteristics.
- Personal factors: sense of self; workplace readiness; social networks.
- Environmental factors: labour market; public policy; social dynamics.
Takeaweays:
- From employment to employability.
- The role of NGOs in workforce employment.
- Three roles of ICT skills training: improves technical skills; catalyses the development of non-technical social and cultural skills.
