Stories from the field: The gendered dimensions of digital financial services in Cambodia

Authors: SPOANN Vin, SAN Vibol, THATH Rido, CHHAY Phanharoth, Isaac Lyne, Erin Taylor, Alexandra Peralta and Heather Horst 

In November 2024, members of our research team conducted interviews and focus groups in two districts in Battambang Province in northwest Cambodia. As with previous trips, the use over-the-counter services such as WING remained a dominant practice.

However, we are beginning to hear stories about the use of digital financial services by men and women. 

For example, in one district we worked in, a middle-aged man named Mao Reth who farmed fruit and cattle exclusively used cash. However, he noted that his son, aged in his mid-twenties, had started to use a banking app. His son lived at home and worked in the city and recently began buying high-quality fruit farming inputs from a dealer at the Thai border. [name] was impressed with his son’s initiative, and he felt comfortable asking his son to send or receive digital payments on his behalf. However, he felt he was too old to learn new things and would leave it to the younger generations to work in digital payments.  

Women were also starting to navigate digital financial services. One woman named [pseudonym, age range] that we interviewed stated that she downloaded a banking app on her phone. While she thought the service could be convenient, she admitted that did not know how to use it and was waiting for her husband to show her how to use it. Because she was generally unfamiliar with banking, she worried that the bank might deduct all the money in the account as a repayment for the loan that she held with the bank. 

However other women demonstrated more comfort with digital financial services. In one of our women’s focus group interviews, participants described how that they started using DFS as a workaround solution for online shopping on Facebook marketplace. They discussed ordering an item to be sent by courier and used WING to pay. Another woman discussed how she was engaging in small-scale e-commerce. Although many of the uses of digital financial services by women in this group were unrelated to farming, they suggest a growing comfort with DFS among younger women living in rural Cambodia. The extent to which these may transfer to household farming practices remains an open question.