Digital Market Linkages - Going Global with Home-Based Work

Can connecting women in rural areas to urban markets through digital finance and e-commerce create and sustain market linkages? Can it improve women’s  socio-economic outcomes? We will pilot an intervention that  employs digital connectivity to overcome spatial mismatches, i.e. to alleviate the disconnect between where our workers live and where demand for their products exists. We design a Digital Market Linkage (DML) model to test its feasibility on a sample of women in rural Pakistan who were trained in stitching through a prior skills training intervention and are using their skills to earn. Our intervention involves the provision of startup capital and digital literacy training to encourage participants to use digital finance and e-commerce solutions to establish an online presence and start selling their products to a broader consumer base. The pilot study is intended to lay the groundwork for a randomized control trial (RCT) that evaluates a cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable DML model.