Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:08am

Pakistan imposes widespread internet and social media bans • The Register

Outage-watching org NetBlocks has analyzed the performance of Pakistan's networks in recent days and substantiated reports of outages.

"NetBlocks metrics confirm the disruption of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on multiple internet providers in Pakistan on Tuesday 9 May 2023. Additionally, total internet shutdowns have been observed on mobile networks in some regions," the outfit stated.

Digital rights advocacy organization Access Now has called for connectivity to be restored.

"People rely on the internet to obtain healthcare, education, and even earn their livelihoods," said the org’s Asia-Pacific policy director Raman Jit Singh Chima. "Hitting the kill switch is neither necessary nor proportionate, and can never be justified. Pakistani authorities must scrap their go-to tool used to quash political protests over the last year."

Chima's point about livelihoods applies to Pakistan itself: the nation promotes the use of freelance remote work platforms as a way for residents to earn a living and to improve services exports.

This round of lockdowns has, however, seen prominent freelance platform Fiverr warn users that workers in the nation are at risk, per the screenshot below.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:10am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...

This week's Big Story examines Pakistan's financial gender gap. According to the World Bank's Global Findex Database, which tracks the use of financial services, only 13% of Pakistani women have their own bank accounts, compared with 28% of men. The story takes an in-depth look at what is still keeping women away from financial institutions and how this is hindering the growth of Pakistan's economy.

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LAHORE -- Only 13% of women in Pakistan own bank accounts, the fourth-lowest proportion in the world.

When she was growing up, Mashal Wali watched her mother, Nasreen Muzaffar, put away a little money every week, storing it in a safe in their home. She would bring it with her when she went to the jamatkhana, a prayer hall for people from the Ismaili subsect of Shiite Islam. There, Muzaffar would contribute the money to a group savings account organized by managers at the adjacent community center near her home in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan.

The cash Wali's mother saved was leftover pocket money that she had received from her husband for household expenses and food. Muzaffar's contributions, along with savings from other women in her community, went into a joint bank account that she or her neighbors could draw from when they needed money for big expenses. This system helped her save up for personal items as well as gifts for her children, including a bike and a camera.

In Pakistan, community savings systems like the one Muzaffar uses are a mainstay, in part because many people do not have bank accounts of their own.


Pakistan has one of the lowest financial inclusion rates in the world, with 79% of its 231 million people operating outside of the formal banking system, according to the World Bank's Global Findex Database, which tracks the use of financial services. But women are disproportionately on the wrong side of this financial divide: only 13% of Pakistani women have their own bank accounts, compared to 28% of men. In a World Bank survey of over 135 countries and territories, Pakistan finished fourth from the bottom for female financial inclusion. In Asia, it was the third-lowest, after Afghanistan and Yemen. Outside Asia, only South Sudan has a lower level of account ownership by women.

The unbanked deal in cash, borrow from friends and family, and save through community groups built by social networks and trust. It is a system nurtured by communities for generations but rife with local politics and family drama, all of which women must negotiate to make use of informal community savings.

Part of the reason for their lack of access to finance is that roughly 75% of Pakistan's women are not formally employed, according to the World Bank. Many are labeled housewives and homemakers and completely reliant on the incomes of their husbands and other male relatives.

Even formally employed Pakistani women are excluded from banking, with only 16% maintaining their own personal account instead of operating from someone else's account. That compares to an average of 68% of women in developing countries globally who have accounts, according to data from the World Bank.

Pakistan's low rates of financial inclusion for women reflect a societywide issue of gender inequality. The country ranks second-lowest in the world in terms of gender parity, at 145th out of 146 economies in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index from 2022. Afghanistan ranks 146th.

The index studies economic participation, education, health and political empowerment. "[In Pakistan], women and men are really standing in very different places," said Shazreh Hussain, an independent social development and gender consultant in Islamabad.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:11am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...


"The ability for women to independently maintain money, spend money, conduct transactions and get paid for their labor and to control the funds that are theirs, that ability is severely dented or compromised because their engagement with formal banking channels is through men," said Mosharraf Zaidi, founder of Tabadlab, a policy research institute in Islamabad.

In Gilgit, Wali said many women of her mother's generation -- Muzaffar is 51 -- spend their days at home, apart from a weekly trip to the jamatkhana. Community saving there is the easiest choice -- women do not have to make a separate trip to the bank and can trust the financial managers at the nearby community center to handle the details for them.

"Most of the women are illiterate and have never ever been to a school or any learning platform so they don't know anything about how to run normal bank accounts," Wali said, referring to women her mother's age. Education levels are considerably higher for younger generations of women from her area.

The case for improving women's financial inclusion in Pakistan is substantial. The World Bank recognizes women's financial inclusion as a key factor in achieving at least seven out of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Women's participation in the labor force in Pakistan has more than doubled during the past three decades, and by some estimates, boosting women's financial inclusion could increase the nation's gross domestic product by 33%.

Getting women involved in finance has also been shown to increase gender equality; a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Groningen found women who are financially included tend to be more independent and have more bargaining power in the household.

Experts say including women in formal financing will help them contribute to Pakistan's economy -- generating activity the cash-strapped country sorely needs. "To make them part of the financial market is the first step towards actually making them part of economic growth," said Fareeha Armughan, a research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, a think tank in Islamabad, who specializes in financial inclusion and governance.

Roadblocks to closing the gap

Pakistan is improving access to financial services. The country launched a National Financial Inclusion Strategy in 2015, and the State Bank of Pakistan adopted a Banking on Equality Policy in 2021 to address gendered obstacles to banking. The policy acknowledged how far Pakistan needs to go to close the gender gap in its financial system.

But tackling issues of gender in financial inclusion is a challenge in Pakistan, since reasons for exclusion are often complex -- both social and socio-economic. According to data from Tabadlab, the most common reason cited by Pakistanis for staying out of the formal financial net was insufficient funds. The second most common reason was lack of documentation -- a problem that is frequently faced by women and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

"So much of how we understand Pakistan is actually caught up in a lot of cultural and sociological and societal and political ... analysis," Tabadlab's Zaidi said. "What it ignores is the base foundation for all the dysfunction, which is economic."

In Pakistan, 38% of adults are illiterate and more than 37% of the population lives in poverty, according to Tabadlab. The institute found men are two times more likely than women to be financially included, and residents of urban areas are 1.5 times more likely to be included in formal financing than those of rural areas.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:12am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...



Armughan said these factors marginalize certain groups in Pakistan, especially women in rural areas, and keep them from seeking out formalized financial services. "Financial exclusion is actually part of a larger phenomenon of service exclusion," she said, adding that service exclusion is an extension of social exclusion.

On the supply side, commercial banks have few incentives to serve women, who are seen as a credit risk if they do not have a steady income stream from a job of their own or if they make up the 1% of Pakistani women who are entrepreneurs.

Strict documentation rules at financial institutions in Pakistan meant to stop money laundering and terror financing can make opening a standard bank account a tedious process for men, and even more so for women, who often are less likely to have official documents, such as land deeds, in their name.

On the demand side, economic marginalization and geographic isolation in rural areas keep both women and men out of formal financing because it is difficult to access banks. Lack of documentation and low literacy rates can also make banking an intimidating and confusing proposition for people from lower social strata. Financial scams in Pakistan often prey on these knowledge gaps among people who are new to formal banking.

Distrust in formal financial systems because of economic uncertainty also plays a role in the scale of Pakistan's informal economy. "[Fewer] people today are confident about savings instruments at banks than they were five years ago, 10 years ago," Zaidi told Nikkei.

Social and religious traditions surrounding gender roles also contribute to the financial gender gap. Men are seen as the primary breadwinners in most families, making it less likely for mothers, wives and daughters to have separate bank accounts. Women in Pakistan are also engaged in unpaid care work at home and in the agricultural sector, keeping them out of the formal financial system because they do not earn salaries in these roles. According to a U.N. Women report published in 2019, Pakistani women spend 11 hours on unpaid care and domestic work for every one hour their male counterparts spend on it.

Simple factors like the distance it takes to walk to a bank or fears of harassment on the way can act as deterrents."[Men] go to offices. They openly walk on the roads, but women don't do this," Wali from Gilgit said, referring to the experiences of women from her mother's generation. These risks contribute to women's preference for saving at the community center, where they already go every week with their families.

Community is key

The pandemic stretched household finances in Pakistan to the breaking point and put informal community financial pools under severe strain. With many unemployed, families had to borrow money to make ends meet, and those debts are starting to fall due.

The country's ongoing economic crisis has also fueled record levels of inflation, which hit 35% in March, making basic necessities considerably more expensive. This has compounded the hardships of those people who were already recovering from financial challenges during the pandemic.

In Molvi Suleman Jat, a village in the district of Thatta in the southern province of Sindh, less than a handful of women have their own bank accounts and most deal entirely in cash-pooling leftover money into a community savings fund used for medical treatments and other emergency expenses. When someone from the group needs cash, group members give from their savings in the form of a loan, deciding on the repayment terms together.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:13am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...


These types of group saving systems revolve around the idea of social collateral, where the basis of trust is the strength of the ties between group members. In Molvi Suleman Jat, women say they had no conception of saving before a system was started in 2019 through a development program from the Sindh Rural Support Organization funded by the Sindh government. Most women in the village earn through daily labor or by producing and selling local crafts, which allows them to save a minimum of 100 rupees (around 35 cents) per month.


Inez Murray, the CEO of the Financial Alliance for Women, a nonprofit organization focused on women's involvement in financial markets, told Nikkei community savings models are used around the world because of the way they help people in poor communities build up a lump sum. "[It is] a way of putting a barrier between your pocket and somebody else, which is the challenge if you're poor because you just don't have enough resources," she said. "[There are] always competing interests for your money."

People partaking in these systems, however, also often do so because they are excluded from financial services, playing into a cycle of informal borrowing and community financing. Over half of the world's unbanked population is comprised of women, and rates of financial inclusion for women in the developing world have remained largely unchanged for more than a decade despite global efforts to close the gender gap in banking.

Pakistan has targeted women for its national welfare initiative, the Benazir Income Support Programme, through which eligible women receive cash payments through cards issued by the program.

Women-focused programs around the globe have become especially popular in the world of microfinance. Murray says the focus on women in microfinance specifically stems from research that shows women are more trustworthy borrowers than men. "The loan repayment rates in every loan category in every country are better for women," she told Nikkei.

Microfinance is the practice of providing financial services to low-income groups that do not generally have access to them. In her book "Poverty Capital," Ananya Roy describes how the microfinance model, first conceived by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, saw women as an important conduit for financing because of their perceived likeliness to use finances for social development, including schooling and investments in the household. The microfinance model, which initially focused on group-based or "solidarity lending," was premised on the idea that social pressure in communal settings encourages women to repay their loans.

Because they became the focus for microfinance loans, however, women also become victims of predatory lending tactics that can increase debt. Murray of the Financial Alliance for Women says such tactics took root when the sector began looking to lower transaction costs to achieve scale and sustainability. "[It became] much more about the loan officer taking the payments back," she said.

Pakistan's microfinance industry has also faced challenges. In 2012, the World Bank found that between 50% and 70% of microfinance loans to women in Pakistan were actually going to male relatives, while women remained responsible for the transaction costs and the stress of repayment. "Women were borrowing money across groups, and it became very difficult to know who was using money at the end of the day," said Roshaneh Zafar, founder of the Kashf Foundation, the first women-focused microfinance institution in Pakistan. "There were men who had also been pipelined the money."

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:14am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...


Zafar said the global financial crisis of 2008, which caused high rates of inflation and led communities to default on loans, pushed the microfinance industry in Pakistan to shift away from group lending. Since then, the uptake of the CNIC national ID card system, the creation of the Credit Information Bureau, and other forms of digitization helped regulate the market and made it easier for lenders to keep track of where the money was going, she said. Still, the financial crisis brought to light the risks of group financing and the continued challenges of female financial access. "Many of us had to rethink and realign models," Zafar said.

Technological solutions

As Pakistan tries to fix its problem of female financial exclusion, the country's state bank has told commercial instructions to step up their efforts to create products and offer services that cater to women, under the 2021 Banking on Equality Policy. Meanwhile, financial technology startups and development organizations are looking at preexisting models of saving to provide clues about how to get women more involved in financial matters.

Potential product revenue from financial services in the women's market in Pakistan is estimated to be around $652 million per year, according to the Women's Financial Inclusion Data Partnership. Many new models addressing female financial inclusion use mobile applications as an alternative to brick-and-mortar banks, which are often difficult for women to access. The State Bank of Pakistan aims to get 20 million digital banking accounts operating for women by the end of this year.

Mobile banking applications like Easypaisa and JazzCash have become increasingly popular across Pakistan and can be used by anyone with a mobile phone. However, there is also a gender gap in phone ownership, with 50% of women owning a cellphone compared to 81% of men, according to the GSMA, an organization that represents mobile telecommunications operators.


Mobile banking options are becoming increasingly popular among Pakistani women, although only half of the female population owns a mobile phone. © AFP/Jiji
In Molvi Suleman Jat, where many of the women are illiterate, dealing in cash is a much better system than mobile banking, which is still an unknown concept. "We lack skills to use smartphones because we never went to school," said Rukiya Jat, a manager for one of the village savings groups. "We are learning. We have the curiosity to be part of the world, so our girls are going to [learn how to] use technology."

Reza Baqir, the former Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, told Nikkei that none of the conventional explanations related to religion or culture seemed to account for the gender gap he was seeing in Pakistan's finances. Getting commercial banks to see women's accounts as profitable seemed to Baqir the most critical strategy in addressing the gender gap. "It was clearly a case of market failure where the market was not rising up to this opportunity," he said. The State Bank's policy includes a section that requires all banks to create and invest in a specialized banking department for women's products.

Numerous commercial banks in Pakistan -- including Habib Bank Ltd. (HBL), Allied Bank and Bank Alfalah -- have launched women-specific bank accounts to attract more female customers. Accounts like HBL's Nisa Asaan account, which is geared toward low-income women, can be opened with only a national identity card and has no minimum account balance.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:15am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...



Shazia Gul, head of the Women Market at HBL, said these types of initiatives are meant to help get women financially included by removing the barriers to entry that exist for standard accounts. "We've done that to encourage women and develop a more enabling environment for them so that they're able to become part of the system on easy terms," Gul said. HBL launched its first women's account in 2016. Gul said the Banking on Equality Policy has given an added impetus to focus on women's products and policies. "It's not just about encouraging new accounts for us," Gul said. "It's about activating the existing [accounts] and also encouraging activity."

Some fintech companies in Pakistan have looked to community financing as the first step in getting women banked. Halima Iqbal, the founder of Oraan, a financial services startup, saw business potential in digitizing ballot committees -- a popular form of community savings -- when she returned to Pakistan in 2017 after working in Canada as an investment banker.

Iqbal and her team have helped dozens of women open bank accounts. According to Oraan's research, more than 40% of Pakistanis use the committee system for savings. Iqbal said committees are something women already feel comfortable using, which is why they were willing to try using the digital system. "There's a very deep-rooted cultural, social, religious aspect around it, right, like my mother did it, my grandmother did it," she said.

Oraan thought up a way to digitize committees by creating a platform that could organize the process and give people a trustworthy way to join committees outside of their immediate community. "Very quickly, we started recognizing that people don't necessarily want a better system," Iqbal said. "What they want is access to maybe a larger audience." By expanding on the committee model, Iqbal said Oraan's products seek to decentralize the risk in case certain communities experience a financial shock.

In December, a scam based out of Karachi brought risks of informal financing to life for Mariam Fareed, who'd begun paying into a community savings committee she'd read about in a Facebook group. The group has 35,000 members and in it, women post about their businesses, their homes and their lives.

Fareed started paying 7,500 rupees a month to secure her spot in the committee organized by an active member of the Facebook group, a woman she knew only by name and reputation. After four months, she started reading posts about the organizer, who'd failed to pay out thousands of collective dollars to dozens of members. Fareed got her money back but learned a lesson about blind trust of informal financing. "She didn't give me her details and I guess I also didn't give mine and that's my mistake," Fareed said.

Maham Alavi, who runs a Facebook page with the intention of helping women learn the basics of investing, said this is something she encounters often with women in her network who are only beginning to manage their own finances. Many worry that if they make a mistake investing, they will draw ire from family members, who won't trust them with finances in the future. Alavi said many women in her network lack basic financial literacy or confidence to do anything with their money besides stashing it somewhere in their homes.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2023 at 10:15am

Pakistan's financial gender gap aggravates chronic poverty


https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Pakistan-s-financia...


Alavi also tries to encourage women to put their money into investments other than committees, which she sees as less productive than stocks and other financial ventures. Still, if community financing helps women start taking control of their own money, Alavi sees the system as worthwhile because it would give them some protection in unstable living situations. "They just need to have that financial independence that God forbid, if something happens, they have something with them."

Efforts to increase financial inclusion for women in Pakistan have shown signs of progress. From 2017 to 2021, account use by women almost doubled. HBL said the bank's specialized women's accounts now make up 29% of total accounts in branch banking, and 23% of their branchless banking accounts are registered to women.

Wali from Gilgit said there is less desire to use community financing among people from her generation, who are moving away from rural areas to study and work. The 19-year-old has her own bank account, which she uses to pay her accommodation fees for university. "I go to the bank," she said, "so I don't need to use [community savings] because the [other options] are more convenient for me."

Armughan of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute said convenience is one key to getting more women involved. She believes high rates of informal financing should not be seen as a sign that women do not want to be included in formal banking. Instead, it should suggest that formal banking still has a way to go to serve them.

"This market is not designed for [women]," she said. "The products are not tailored for them."

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