By Georgia Barrie, Co-founder of startup Farm.ink
Published on https://medium.com.
Nov 28, 2017
We recently launched a new Messenger chatbot called the Africa Farmers Club. It provides farmers with local trending news about their crops and a way to connect with other farmers in their local area. While we’ve been excited by the speed at which we’ve gained traction over the last few weeks, one thing has been bugging me: our gender gap.
In my previous life I advised mobile money providers on how to better target women in their markets and reduce the, often persistent, gap between male and female users. In some really bad cases the proportion of women using mobile money in a market was as low as 30%. That’s why I was pretty horrified to see that as our user base was growing so was our gender gap. In the middle of last week we hit the 70% men mark and I knew we had to act.
