In the world's toughest places,
women are our strength.
Resilient and resourceful, women use wits + mobile phones + community networks as tools to learn and earn; pipelines to nutrition and healthcare; lifelines during crises; and pathways to opportunity and independence.
Empowered, networked, digitally savvy girls and women are better equipped to deal with day-to-day emergencies, national challenges, and the impacts of climate change in their communities.
Digital Financial Literacy Training
Optimizing Digitized Wage & G2P Payments
Digitizing Her Corner Shop UpSkilling MicroEntrepreneurs
Preparing Women Patients and Healthcare Workers for Telehealth
Training Hard-to-Reach Women through Asynchronous Learning Chatbots
and BIte-sized Videos
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Mobilizing
Digital Sisterhood
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropic investors, She Mobilizes focuses on low-income, low-literacy and marginalized women, including women with disabilities, to demonstrate how unbanked women can empower themselves using digital tools. With the right training, tools and social capital, we believe she can lift herself out of poverty using the mobile phone that's in her hands.
At pop-up street campaigns, midwife stations, and on factory floors, women are training women to safely and effectively use mobile financial services for sustainable self-learning, better health, entrepreneurship, and collective empowerment.
Because many women suffer time poverty and are unable to leave home or work responsibilities to attend trainings, we've developed bite-sized videos and interactive closed-domain chatbots so she can learn and review on her own schedule--in between work, harvesting, cooking, baby feeding and caring for household and family.
We look forward to learning and sharing best practices widely in order to advance women's financial inclusion and close the gender gap. Connected, she will survive--then thrive.
What We Do
In wet markets, factories, bamboo homes and village gatherings, women are training women to safely and effectively use mobile financial services to break the cycle of poverty.
What is
Digital Sisterhood?
Digital Financial
Literacy Training
Expanding Her
Economic Ecosystem
Optimizing
Digitized Wages
& G2P Payments
Digital Sisterhood is a digital economic ecosystem specifically designed for marginalized women in poor, rural, fragile, and conflict-affected situations to learn from each other and to support each other’s needs and challenges.
In Digital Sisterhood, women build social capital along with financial capital.
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Digital Sisterhood listens to and designs with women on the ground, understands her challenges, responds to her needs. It builds skills and services for women while growing income and developing markets for women entrepreneurs. It’s a cross-sector community collaboration with women at the core. Digital Sisterhood is what makes digital finance stick. Digital Sisterhood and mobile money are game changers for women in need.
We’ve found that the quickest way to solve challenges in difficult environments is to identify and work with bright spots, pinpointing where something is going right, analyzing why, and cloning.
In places where women are not part of the formal leadership structure, we identify and work with women who wield informal power in the community. We learn from her savvy and strengthen and her skills and networks.
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We leverage existing women’s self-help groups and/or create new trust circles for women micro-entrepreneurs, women mobile money agents, women in crisis, pregnant and blind and deaf people. In these empowerment groups, often virtual, women learn from each other; open digital wallets together; ask and answer questions of each other; and support each other with tech troubleshooting and tips on using mobile wallets.
Women mobile money agents and shopkeepers share tips on liquidity management, marketing, supply chain and other micro-business issues.
Depending on the group, women may also discuss relevant life issues including women’s health, breastfeeding, child sleep and nutrition, and relationships.
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Our digital literacy and digital financial literacy curriculum for low-literacy learners was developed in partnership with grassroots women's groups and is adapted to the needs and culture of women, region by region.
Using a training-of-trainers model, women can onboard and learn to use mobile wallets online or at vibrant street campaigns, savings group meetings, and gatherings of midwives, teachers, farmers, or factory workers. By practicing back-and-forth transactions, women become confident sending and receiving money, uploading apps, protecting passwords, and buying and selling airtime.
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We reach isolated and difficult-to-reach women with asynchronous digital literacy products—including closed-domain ChatBots and how-to videos—designed for women’s busy schedules and low-bandwidth environment. Our method trains local teams to create step-by-step video bites and chatbot flows for women to learn and review digital literacy lessons on their own schedules and at their own pace.
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Our friendly curriculum
includes modules on how to use your mobile phone; protecting personal data and privacy; how to use Playstore, download apps, share data, connect with Bluetooth devices; how to open and use a social media and messaging account on applications such as Viber, Messenger, Signal, Telegram, WeChat; how to QR Code and other mobile financial services; avoiding fraud, what to do if you lose your SIM card or phone; searching for info online using Google, Google translate, YouTube and other online learning sites; why and how to open and use an email account; how to avoid and deal with cyber harassment and cyber crime.
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We upskill and kickstart women micro-entrepreneurship with business training and curricula that results in successful digital marketing of dried fish, herb tinctures, and other local products and services. We help women hone innovative business plans such as halal food carts, online fruit shops and specialty meals ordered online and delivered. We ensure women micro-entrepreneurs have basic business skills to manage inventory and budget and know how to forecast and assess risk.
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When appropriate, we help set up Digital Sisterhood support circles alongside the micro-entrepreneurship training so that women can troubleshoot, brainstorm and cheer for each other while they grow their businesses.
One woman micro-entrepreneur went from never having used mobile money to becoming one of the largest mobile money agents and shop owners in the region--in less than two years.
We've helped women access capital by working with local women’s savings groups to create small revolving grants for women micro-entrepreneurs. Women shopkeepers upskilling to become mobile money agents, for example, need that larger sum of cash for the float.
We strengthen the digital ecosystem in villages and expand markets for women mobile money agents by training and opening digital wallets for women G2P recipients, women’s saving group members, midwives, and other trusted community influencers.
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For implementers of large-scale payment digitization, we provide technical support--including proven practical tips and behavioral nudges to optimize women's uptake of payment digitization. We strive for responsible and responsive payment digitization that supports women’s economic empowerment rather than exacerbating gender gaps.
We suggest ways to find, upskill, and partner with women’s self-help circles, community groups and local influencers. We partner implementers with local women's groups on innovations to leverage digital payments, digital skills, and digital community to improve women's lives and agency whether through better maternal nutrition or access to livelihood opportunities.
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We help prepare women to receive digital payments though digital literacy and digital financial literacy training. We reach women at times and places that are safe and convenient for them whether that be village savings circles, factory dormitories or Street Team outreach at locl marketplaces or when they're waiting in line for appointments.
Our friendly curriculum, designed for low literacy learners, has successfully trained people with disabilities, including those who are blind, to onboard to digital finance. When appropriate, we provide micro-entrepreneurship training along with the support of Digital Sisterhood circles.
Because many women suffer time poverty and are unable to leave home or work responsibilities to attend trainings, we’ve developed innovative asynchronous training modules—including step-by-step videos and interactive chatbots—so she can learn and review on her own schedule.
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Who we are
She Mobilizes is an initiative of Partners Asia, a U.S.-based nonprofit with 35 years experience supporting community-led efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in Southeast Asia. We work with grassroots partners in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Kenya, and, prior to the coup, Myanmar.
Our team members, based in Southeast Asia and the U.S., have deep experience in fintech and have worked with indigenous, poor, rural, migrant and marginalized communities for more than a decade. Tackling core issues such as gender equality and poverty alleviation requires collaboration. Our trusted relationships at the local, national and international level in industry, government, and civil society help us facilitate partnerships to develop appropriate curriculum, support digitization of government payments and factory salaries, train the hardest-to-reach women, and develop digital infrastructure to bridge the gender gap and alleviate poverty.
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She Mobilizes is grateful to its many partners and funders over the years, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and philanthropic investors including the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Girls and Women's Leadership Initiative, and Partners Asia's Chairman of the Board Hal Nathan whose years of steadfast support of grassroots community development and women leaders enabled She Mobilizes to incubate and grow its social innovation strategy.
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Leadership
Pwint Htun
Pwint Htun, President and Co-Founder of She Mobilizes (formerly Mobilizing Myanmar) is a technologist who has advised governments, international organizations and civil society groups on digital inclusion and financial services for the poor since 2012. After bringing the first-ever official delegation from Myanmar to Tanzania to learn from East Africa’s digital finance experience, she served as architect of Myanmar’s digital financial services industry. In 2014, she led efforts to draft Mobile Financial Services Regulations that were enacted by the Central Bank of Myanmar. Pwint has long advocated for women, rural, poor and disabled populations to have access to information, finance and a social safety net through technology. Originally from a village in the Ayeyarwady Delta, Pwint has a BS in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington, a Masters of Engineering Management from Northwestern University, and Executive Education training from Harvard Business School. She spent two decades in the US working on innovation in the telecommunications industry at T-Mobile, Hewlett- Packard and Agilent Technologies. She served on Partners Asia’s Board of Directors from 2012-2019, was a nonresident Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and is an alum of WomenLift Health’s 2021 Leadership journey. Pwint is fluent in English and Myanmar.
Paula Bock, Chief Communications Officer & Co-Founder of She Mobilizes, is a writer, communications strategist, and photographer whose work has earned 50 journalism awards, three nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, and generated large-scale support for communities in need. She’s focused her career on creating social impact through journalism, digital financial services, health and civil society organizations, and corporate engagement. She’s been involved with marginalized peoples in Asia and Africa since 1996 as a veteran Seattle Times journalist, Mae Tao Clinic volunteer, Partners Asia staff, and co-founder of She Mobilizes (formerly Mobilizing Myanmar), a Digital Sisterhood initiative supported by the Gates Foundation and other investors. She’s also served in senior editorial roles at global nonprofit PATH and Pacific Science Center. Paula earned a college degree from Harvard University, studied as a Rotary International Ambassador in Taipei and serves on PATH's Institutional Review Board. Her documentary photographs were awarded laurels at Women Deliver 2023 and appear in the Smithsonian Institution's online exhibition, A Day in the Life of Asian Pacific America, and in newspapers, magazines, and nonprofit publications.
