WASHINGTON DC, Mar 10 (IPS) – The three writers are Financial Sector Analysts at the Washington-based Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP)*The gender gap in mobile phone ownership is well-documented. For years now, the financial inclusion community has been trying to get phones into the hands of more women at the last mile — spurred on by mounting evidence that mobile money can increase women’s financial resilience, expand their economic opportunities and improve their intra-household bargaining power.
Read the full story, “Can Free Phones Close the Digital Gender Divide?”, on globalissues.org →
Egypt: Fact-checking site’s entire newsroom jailed as assault on press freedom widens 
Nearly 64,000 flee Nigeria for Niger where a humanitarian crisis is deepening 
Ebola: IOM urges wider surveillance beyond formal routes in DR Congo 
Before We Declare Gender Bias Dead, Read the Footnotes 
World News in Brief: Ending cholera by 2030 ‘within reach’, Haiti displacement and hunger, US human rights review rescheduled 
Climate crisis could push 141 million more women into extreme poverty 
Light is hard to block from every direction. This physicist found a way