Welcome to the DiFF Project!
Dear readers,
I am very pleased to welcome you to the DiFF project on behalf of our excellent team at Western Sydney University, the University of Adelaide, the National University of Laos, and the Royal University of Phnom Penh.
You probably landed on our website because you have an interest in digital finance in some form—perhaps relating to farmers and women, or perhaps a broader interest in their impact on development. Either way, we are glad you’re here, as one of our core missions is to engage with stakeholders to ensure the knowledge we produce is applied to improving programs, policies and products that use digital financial tools to help low income people, while avoiding harm as much as possible.
What is DiFF? Digital Finance and Farming is a five-year-long, mixed-methods research project that will collect existing evidence on the impacts of digital finance on farming households, and produce new evidence through conducting empirical research in Laos and Cambodia.
The project came into existence when the team were approached by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) to investigate how farmers in Southeast Asia were incorporating new digital financial tools into their farming and everyday practices. ACIAR have been working in the region for years to support research and development that advances farming techniques, improves value chains, and tackles other emerging issues facing the agricultural sector, such as climate change. Until now, however, ACIAR had not funded any projects on farming and financial services.
Our team worked with ACIAR to identify a core problem: that digital financial services are increasingly becoming accessible to farmers, yet little is known of the risks and benefits they present, or how they impact different members of farming households. This is not only true of Southeast Asia, but the world in general: literature on impact is scarce.
We formally began our project on 6 May 2022. Over the next five years we will be building an evidence base of impacts and doing original research (including interviews, surveys, and experiments) to answer the following research questions:
What are the social and economic effects of mobile financial services on women and men in farming households in Cambodia and Laos?
What are the gaps in the available evidence? How can addressing these gaps support organisations (governments, NGOs, companies) to better assist women and men in farming households through more informed policy making and program design, and products that meet identified needs?
In what ways might mobile financial services function as a pathway to increase or decrease gender equality for women in farming households?
How are current institutional arrangements likely to facilitate the design and implementation of mobile finance that reduces poverty and does no harm?
Along the way, we are keen to engage with stakeholders to ensure our work is relevant to practice. If you are interested in knowing more, please reach out to us at info@diffproject.org.
We look forward to working with you!
Erin
The Hague, May 2022
