This deck presents the detailed findings of the Digital Personas study across six themes: affordability, discontinuities, gender norms, skills and learning, health, and relevance. It explores what pulls women toward digital technology, the desire to earn money, learn, and access health information, and the barriers that interrupt their access, from charging and data costs to shame, harmful content, and community pressure. Survey data is paired with voice responses and sociolinguistic analysis to surface not only what women do, but how they feel, offering policymakers, donors, telcos, service providers, and designers a grounded evidence base for building solutions that fit the realities of women's digital lives.

Women are pulled toward digital technology by clear desires, to earn money, expand their knowledge, and access health information, yet their journeys are repeatedly interrupted: by practical barriers like phone charging and data costs, by self-imposed restrictions shaped by social norms and harmful online content, and by confidence gaps such as shame about asking for help. Across a seven-part series, the deck traces how these barriers shift between countries and between urban and rural settings, offering policymakers, donors, telcos, digital service providers, and designers a grounded view of the realities women navigate every day.

This paper sets out the methodology behind the Digital Personas study. Designed so that respondents did not need to be literate to take part, the study combined keypad and open-ended voice responses, audio skits that invited women to react to fictional scenarios rather than speak about themselves directly, AI-assisted coding of open-ended responses, and sociolinguistic analysis of the audio itself to surface emotional signals that content alone cannot reveal. The paper walks through each stage of the work, from sampling and recruitment to survey delivery, audio processing, and reporting, and closes with a summary of the study's key findings on what drives women toward digital tools and what holds them back.

See our past and upcoming events discussing and disseminating our findings from this project.

A central methodological innovation was the use of audio skits. Rather than asking respondents directly about abstract concepts like data privacy or digital risk — questions that often produce thin or socially desirable answers — we scripted short dramatized scenarios performed by voice actors in local languages. Participants listened and then reflected on what they heard, which gave them distance from the topic and made sensitive issues easier to discuss candidly.

For each of the seven themes explored in the Digital Personas study, we are publishing the underlying respondent-level data as anonymized Excel files, alongside codebooks that explain every variable. Each file is organized by country, with separate sheets for Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal, and contains the coded responses from over 3,500 women interviewed across urban and rural settings. Respondents are identified only by anonymized IDs, with no personally identifying information retained. The data sets capture both keypad responses and the coded outputs of voice answers, allowing researchers, policymakers, and designers to interrogate the findings directly, replicate the analysis, or build their own work on top of a comparable cross-country evidence base.