Mobile phones have revolutionized people’s lives and everyday activities. This mobile phone revolution has been profound and widespread and is playing out in unique ways, especially in low-income settings. For billions of people, these relatively cheap, ubiquitous, and multitasking devices enable effective communication, as well as access to information and vital services on health, education, society, and the economy.

Several countries around the world with otherwise poor infrastructure – in particular in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia – have completely leapfrogged communication technologies such as phone landlines and fixed internet connections (e.g., broadband), and have directly entered the wireless age. With an eye to the particular features that characterize the mobile phone revolution in low-income countries, social scientists have started to measure its consequences in specific contexts. As an example, Suri and Jack (2016) have shown that enhanced access to mobile money has increased long-term consumption in Kenya and reduced the number of households in extreme poverty, while health-care interventions based on mobile phones have been shown to improve the delivery of health services, including access to antiretroviral (Lester et al. 2010) and malaria therapies (Zurovac et al. 2011).

Mobile phones and women’s empowerment

Can mobile phones help with the attainment of the sustainable development goals? We can answer this question by estimating associations between mobile phone access and multiple indicators linked to global sustainable development across more than 200 countries between 1993 and 2017 (Fig. 1).

Outcome measures include the Gender Inequality Index (GII – a comprehensive macro-level indicator of gender inequality comprising reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status), the prevalence of modern contraceptive methods, the maternal mortality ratio, and under-5 child mortality. Fig. 1 (left) shows, for each country–year, the relationship between mobile phone diffusion and the four outcomes, including the least-squares lines (in yellow). At the global level, mobile phone diffusion is negatively correlated with gender inequality as measured by the GII, positively correlated with contraceptive prevalence, and negatively correlated with maternal and child mortality. These associations show nonlinearities across levels of economic development measured by quintiles of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (Fig. 1, right), and are, on average, higher in absolute values for the lowest quintiles. These GDP gradients take the form of J, or reversed-J, curves, with mobile phone diffusion more negatively associated with the GII, maternal and child mortality, and more positively associated with contraceptive prevalence among the least- and less-developed countries. These associations remain statistically significant and robust even when we control for measures linked to economic development (e.g. GDP per capita) and social development (e.g. educational attainment), suggesting that independently of these factors mobile phone diffusion has an important role to play.

Mobile phones and sexual and reproductive health in Africa

The macro-level analyses described above reveal a notable link between mobile phone diffusion and indicators linked to gender equality, which suggests the importance of mobile phone ownership especially for women in low-income contexts. To further investigate these patterns, we conducted an individual-level analysis of 100,000 women from 7 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe) between 2015 and 2017, in which we linked Demographic and Health Survey data with detailed geospatial information. These analyses show that women who own a mobile phone are better informed about sexual and reproductive health services and more empowered to make independent decisions, with payoffs being larger among the most disadvantaged micro-level geographical clusters (Fig. 2).

Other things being equal and across all levels of local development, women who own a mobile phone are more likely to be involved in decision-making processes about contraception, to use modern contraceptive methods, and to know where to get tested for HIV compared to women who do not own a phone. These effects are sizeable, as they are comparable to, if not bigger than, the effects of living in an urban vs. rural area.

Mobile phone acquisition is also associated with reductions in ideal family size and lower completed family size among phone-owning women compared to their phoneless counterparts in Balaka, Malawi, between 2009 and 2015 (Fig. 3). In this area, the demographic transition is underway; however, the slow pace of fertility decline contrasts with the rapid adoption of mobile phones.

Cox proportional hazard models suggest that mobile phones are not associated with the timing of women’s first steps in family formation, but rather with fertility trajectories through child spacing on a longer time-horizon. Furthermore, complementary cross-sectional analyses from a subsequent survey round suggest that mobile phone ownership is associated with fertility through role modeling, preference change, and access to information.

Sustainable development goals within hand’s reach (literally)

These findings highlight the importance of mobile technology for bolstering social development, but also the need to close digital divides. In 2003, the Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus said that the quickest way to get out of poverty right now is to have a mobile telephone. Mobile phones can indeed play a crucial role in ensuring healthy lives and promoting individual well-being at all ages (SDG 3 “good health and well-being”), and in achieving gender equality by empowering girls and women (SDG 5 “gender equality”), as ways to ultimately reduce poverty in all its forms (SDG 1 “no poverty”) and achieve key population targets. However, despite the proliferation of mobile networks, digital divides by gender and socioeconomic strata persist, especially in the developing world. Digital gender divides are especially significant in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where women are much less likely to own and use mobile phones and access the internet (Fatehkia, Kashyap and Weber 2018). Our work suggests that these are the contexts where payoffs to mobile ownership for women are likely to be greater. Investing in equitable access, enabling independent ownership, and facilitating digital skills development are key to forging a stronger pathway between mobile phones and the realization of sustainable development.

References

Billari, F., Rotondi, V., & Trinitapoli, J. (2020). Mobile phones, digital inequality, and fertility: Longitudinal evidence from Malawi. Demographic Research, 42, 1057-1096.

Fatehkia, Masoomali, Ridhi Kashyap, and Ingmar Weber. “Using Facebook ad data to track the global digital gender gap.” World Development 107 (2018): 189-209.

Lester, R.T., Ritvo, P., Mills, E.J., Kariri, A., Karanja, S., Chung, M.H., Jack, W., Habyarimana, J., Sadatsafavi, M., Najafzadeh, M. et al. (2010). Effects of a mobile phone short message service on antiretroviral treatment adherence in Kenya (‘WelTel Kenya1’): A randomised trial. The Lancet 376(9755): 1838–1845.

Rotondi, V., Kashyap, R., Pesando, L. M., Spinelli, S., & Billari, F. C. (2020). Leveraging mobile phones to attain sustainable development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Suri, T., & Jack, W. (2016). The long-run poverty and gender impacts of mobile money. Science, 354(6317), 1288-1292.

Zurovac, D., Sudoi, R.K., Akhwale, W.S., Ndiritu, M., Hamer, D.H., Rowe, A.K., and Snow, R.W. (2011). The effect of mobile phone text-message reminders on Kenyan health workers’ adherence to Malaria treatment guidelines: A cluster randomised trial. The Lancet 378(9793): 795–803.

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A key aspect of the digital revolution that has modified lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the rapid diffusion of the Internet, and access to high-speed (broadband) Internet in particular. The profound social and economic implications of the Internet’s spread have been underlined by social science scholars since its inception (DiMaggio et al. 2001). More recently, researchers have also started to focus on the effect of the Internet on family life, in terms of both daily and longer-term schedules.

In a recent study (Billari et al. 2019), we investigate whether the diffusion of high-speed Internet has an impact on fertility in a low-fertility setting, that of Germany, a country where the total fertility rate has remained stable at around 1.35 children per woman for several years now. Related empirical studies have focused on the effect of the Internet on marriage rates (Bellou 2015), labour force participation of married women (Dettling 2017), and teenage fertility (Guldi and Herbst 2017) in the United States. But little is known about the effects of Internet on general fertility, of both sexes, and outside the US.

Data

We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a longitudinal panel dataset about the German population. These data are uniquely suited to studying the effect of broadband diffusion on fertility. First, they contain retrospective life course information, including fertility histories. Second, they contain household information not only on Internet access, but also on access via broadband technology (digital subscriber line, DSL). This information is exploited to build our key explanatory variable. Lastly, the SOEP also contains rich information on individuals’ life courses and conditions, including working from home, other labour market behaviour, time spent on childcare, and life satisfaction; thereby enabling us to shed light on the potential mechanisms whereby high-speed Internet access may affect fertility.

The (causal?) association between home broadband Internet access and fertility

In Figures 1 and 2, we analyse age differences in fertility according to access to DSL among highly educated and less-educated individuals, respectively. Overall, the pattern that emerges is that broadband Internet access at home is positively correlated with the probability of a birth, but only among highly educated individuals older than 25. The opposite pattern is seen among less-educated individuals. However, it is not clear whether this correlation is driven by selection on unobservable factors or by a causal effect.

We exploit an instrumental variable (IV) strategy (along the lines suggested by Falck et al. 2014) to investigate whether DSL availability has causally increased fertility. Table 1 provides the results of this analysis by education group for individuals aged 25-45. We find a positive and significant effect of DSL on fertility only among highly educated women (see column 3), whose fertility is thus increased by about 13.3 percentage points. The effect is also positive among highly educated men (7%), but is not statistically significant. Finally, the coefficient is negative, and, again, not significant, among the less educated.

Discussion

What might be the factors underlying the relationship between broadband use and fertility? Taking into account the relevant literature, the Internet may affect fertility through three main mechanisms: information, marriage, and work-family balance.

To test for the relative role of information, we analyse the relationship between low-speed Internet and fertility. While working from home may require high-speed Internet, people can still obtain information with access to a low-speed Internet connection only. Our analysis (see Table A26 of our article) suggests that information plays a limited role in explaining the positive effects of broadband on fertility.

Broadband access may also affect fertility through its potential effects on marriage (Bellou, 2015). We find a positive but non-significant relationship between access to high-speed Internet and the likelihood of marriage for highly educated women aged 25-45 (see column 1 of Table 2).

With regard to the third mechanism, DSL technology provides individuals with more opportunities to do at least part of their work from home, thereby relaxing time constraints, especially among more educated women, and favouring the work-family balance (Dettling 2017). To test this hypothesis, we analyse the effects of DSL access on the likelihood of reporting any work from home, the likelihood of part-time vs. full-time work, working hours, and employment status, among highly educated women aged 25-45. In column 2 of Table 2, we find evidence that high-speed Internet increases the likelihood of working from home by 29.4 percentage points. Columns 3 and 4 suggest that access to DSL encourages part-time vs. full-time work. Consistent with this, in column 5 we find that the overall number of hours worked decreases with broadband access. While the point estimate in column 6 suggests a positive effect of broadband on female employment, there is no evidence of a significant effect. In columns 7 and 8, we also find that access to DSL significantly increases time spent on childcare and the likelihood of reporting a high level of life satisfaction.

Overall, our findings suggest that increasing access to high-speed Internet may promote fertility among highly educated women by easing the burden of balancing work and family duties. This may be particularly important in countries such as Germany, which lag behind other advanced economies in terms of their share of telecommuters (Brenke 2016). The downside of our findings is that broadband might introduce a “digital divide” in fertility, allowing highly educated individuals to reach their fertility goals, while not improving the chances of less-educated individuals, who tend to be employed in less flexible occupations.

References

Bellou, A. 2015. “The impact of Internet diffusion on marriage rates: evidence from the broadband market”, Journal of Population Economics 28(2): 265–297.

Billari, F.C., O. Giuntella, and L. Stella. 2019. “Does broadband Internet affect fertility?” Population Studies, forthcoming.

Brenke, K. 2016. “Home offices: Plenty of untapped potential”, DIW Economic Bulletin 6(8): 95-104.

Dettling, L.J. 2017. “Broadband in the labor market: the impact of residential high-speed internet on married women’s labor force participation”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 70(2): 451–482.

DiMaggio, P., E. Hargittai, W.R. Neuman, and J.P. Robinson. 2001. “Social implications of the Internet”, Annual review of sociology 27(1): 307–336.

Falck, O., R. Gold, and S. Heblich. 2014. “E-lections: Voting Behavior and the Internet”, The American Economic Review 104(7): 2238–2265.

Guldi, M., and C.M. Herbst. 2017. “Offline effects of online connecting: the impact of broadband diffusion on teen fertility decisions”, Journal of Population Economics 30(1): 69–91.

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