A study has been conducted previously, there the study team examined the potential of mobile banking technologies for facilitating risk-sharing and insurance in the context of Bangladesh, a country that began to adopt mobile banking technologies in 2010. partnering with Gana Unnayan Kendra (GUK), a local non-governmental organization that works to train garment workers and place them in jobs in Dhaka, the team provided mobile banking accounts to a sample of GUK-affiliated workers to assess whether the technology improves their ability to provide resources to their families in rural Bangladesh, particularly through the annual pre-harvest seasonal famine, called the long season Seasonal variability in incomes, as well as the relatively higher incomes in factory jobs in Dhaka, provides the impetus for migration for many workers, and we test whether facilitating transfers through the mobile money platform improves the ability of recipient households to reduce food consumption variability, and improves recipient household members health, through the difficult famine season. Comparing the outcomes of these bKash-enabled families (the “treatment” group) to those unaffected by the intervention (the “control” group) enabled the team to cleanly estimate the impacts of mobile money on the ability of households to insure themselves against the large seasonal variation in incomes to which they are typically exposed.
The survey round in 2016 showed that digitally connecting very poor households in rural Bangladesh to migrants from their households in Dhaka (via access to bKash) increased remittance flows from Dhaka to rural Bangladesh by 26%, reducing extreme poverty, and increased consumption by 7% in the rural areas. lt also improved conditions during the lean season. The intervention was a 30 to 45-minute training on how to sign-up, technical assistance to use the service and if requested, help with gathering documentation and completing the application form to sign-up. Given the promising results from the last experiment in the Gaibandha-Dhaka migrant corridor, the team would now like to conduct an external validity experiment in other migrant corridors in Bangladesh to test if the same intervention would yield similar results in other migrant corridors as well. For this, two migrant corridors from five corridors in Bangladesh have been narrowed down after a scoping exercise, looking at the migrant density as well as mobile money penetration among the households: Noakhali-Dhaka and Kishoreganj-Dhaka. The project will consist of four main phases: recruitment of household-migrant pairs, a baseline survey, the intervention and an endline survey.
Serial No: 261
Theme: Migration and Human Rights
Research Method: Quantitative
Partner: New York University
Starting Year: 2024
Study Area: Noakhali-Dhaka and Kishoreganj-Dhaka migrant corridors
