How has digitization impacted people's use of services such as payments, remittances, savings and credit? The DiFF project is collecting information on impact in three ways: through a systematic literature review, by interviewing farmers and by interviewing stakeholders.

We are pleased to launch the DiFF Project Report for Year 3 of our 5-year project. This report provides more detail on our Year Three activities and outlines our plans for Years Four and Five.

 In December 2024, members of our research team conducted interviews and focus groups in Luang Prabang Province in northern Laos. This blog reports on our early findings.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of our first DiFF Project Report (Year 2, 2023-2024). In this report we provide details about our findings, and present a road map for the remainder of the project. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas!

Our recent qualitative fieldwork in Laos and Cambdia showed very different results in the two countries. In Laos, many farmers were using digital financial services, but in Cambodia they were not. Why the difference?

On Wednesday, 1 November, the DiFF team held a workshop at the Crowne Plaza in Vientiane to present the initial results of our exercise to map financial inlcusion stakeholders in Laos. Here we present the group discussion on the state of digital financial services in Laos and how the results of our work might be used.

Between mid-October to mid-November, we did the first round of qualitative fieldwork in Laos to begin collecting data and exploring questions regarding discernible impacts of digital financial services on smallholder farmers. In this post we reflect on our process and initial observations.

As part of our workshop in Laos, the DiFF Team undertook a field study tour to a farm in Xienglom village in Luang Prabang Province on Wednesday 25 January 2023. The project team also had the opportunity to visit a local market to observe activities, especially the use of mobile money.