Different reports continue to show glaring gender imbalances in digital and financial inclusion with fewer women involved in this field compared to men yet women are the majority population and thus must be actively involved.

This gender diversity gap can only be closed with deliberate affirmative action that enables women to not only develop products but also devotedly participate in digital and financial inclusion efforts.

Several players continue to contribute towards addressing this issue. One of such initiatives that are supporting women involvement in the digital economy is Her Duuka; a product of Computing Palace Technologies.

“Her Duuka is a women in business ecommerce platform that ensures that women that are still doing business in the native analogue way are trained, and upgraded to the digital way of doing business. Her Duuka ensures that we break the barrier of less women accessing technology. We enable women own and run digital shops. Her Duuka simply means a Woman’s shop but in this case, this is a digital shop that enables women to trade digitally,” Felix Balitumye, a Director at Her Duuka explained.

He added: “To get started, a business woman only needs to go on to our platform, and sign up. Our administration team reviews the submission, confirms compliance to required KYC and when you are approved you then start trading. At this point, you start posting your products and the global market can see them. A buyer simply has to tap on the product they need, add it to their cart and complete the purchase.”

Balitumye highlighted that for women in business that are not tech savvy, they first get digital literacy training before they are onboarded so that they are able to trade freely and rightly anytime.

“When we reach out to you and we realize the digital gap with you as person, we first take you through some basic digital training to ensure that you are able to trade. We also help you upload your first products but along the way for sustainability, we show you how it is done so that you are able to upload the products on your digital shop yourself.”

He noted that the platform is free for all women onboarded with less than 50 items while those that have more than 50 items pay a negotiable subscription fee.

“We started Her Duuka in 2022. Since then, we have onboarded around 600 businesses. These have come from the women in business that we took through digital training skills to ensure that they are able to trade. The reason why we are only onboarding women businesses is because we want to contribute towards closing the gender diversity gap in digital and financial inclusion.”

He highlighted that Her Duuka accepts both mobile money and bank cards transactions with all products prepaid before they are delivered to the buyers.

“We have enabled both mobile money and cards payments. After a payment is completed, then the product is delivered by our dedicated transportation team. We do this to ensure that products are only delivered to customers that actually need them and are available to receive them.”

Her Duuka has featured on Day 34 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s #IncludeEveryone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, #WomeninFinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; #LevelOneProject, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.