Have An MHealth Service? Here's How To Make Sure It Reaches Women Too

I always get very excited about anything new around gender and ICT: new publications, new data sets, new projects, new funds or awards. In the last few months it certainly seems like there have been a lot of new things to get excited about, so much so that when Ronda and I were putting together a list of stories for the forthcoming October issue of our Gender and Mobile newsletter, we actually had a large surplus of gender and ICT stories for once. Compare this to when we first started out, years ago, when sometimes it seemed that we were part of a very small group of people who were interested in the gender digital divide.

Happily, that group is much much bigger now, and this is reflected in the number of new publications that have come out recently. And one of those is something I’ve been working on with GSMA mNutrition: a toolkit and accompanying webinar on how to make an mHealth service more inclusive and reach more women.

When designing an mHealth service that is aimed at women as well as men, it’s important to understand how and why women may use an mHealth service less than men in that context. And once you understand that, you can then devise ways to overcome any female-specific barriers in your product and service design.

The webinar and the toolkit explore some practical things that mobile operators, service providers and NGOs (and anyone else who might be interested) can do to ensure that their mHealth service includes women as well as men. Topics covered include the business case for including women, market opportunity and assessment, content, platforms, user testing, pricing and bundling, marketing and promotion and monitoring and evaluation.

You can find the toolkit here, and watch the webinar.