About the Project
What is the Digital Portfolios of the Poor (DPP)?
Digital Portfolios of the Poor is a research project designed to understand the gendered differences in digital lives of the poor, enabling us to act more quickly to close gender gaps and to design and create gender-transformative digital products. DPP leverages high-powered, scalable and low-cost research methods to gather a 360 degree view into the digital lives of vulnerable people – particularly women – in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Kenya.
Insights from the DPP have the potential to improve the effectiveness of products developed by digital financial services providers, as well as the overall digital enabling environment, for the world's most vulnerable populations. The DPP's innovative research method gives people the space to talk in their own language or dialect, gathering voices in detail and at scale.
Why does DPP matter?
The results from this Project will inform the design and delivery of education efforts to engage low-income people, especially women, about how to manage their data privacy and risks. Further, they will provide evidence for policymakers to structure balanced policies that protect low-income people, yet enable appropriate digital financial services, especially for women.
Who is behind DPP?
This project is generously funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by Decodis, a social research company, in partnership with The Leir Institute and The Fletcher School at Tufts University. We also have field partners who are key to making this project possible.
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Qualitative Insights at Scale
The Digital Portfolios of the Poor (DPP) project will develop insights into respondents digital lives by collecting primary qualitative data at scale using a new method developed and piloted by Daryl Collins, CEO and Founder of Decodis. This new and innovative approach leverages tech-led methods including Interactive Voice Recording (IVR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sociolinguistics.
The project engages with local partners in each of the four countries – India, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan to collaborate on the collection of the data of around 1,000 research participants in each of these countries. Learn more below.
Gender impacts digital lives
Early evidence suggests that women experience the digital world differently than men. However, there is a lack of understanding of whether that trust deficit extends to digital financial services and how it may do so.
Our project has a gender lens to better understand the nature of these deficits, especially for women. We need to know more about the entire portfolio of digital services that low-income people use to shape their trust in the entire digital ecosystem.
Research Design
A detailed picture
The diagram below shows the level of detail that we can obtain about a respondent's digital life.
