Gendered distributional impacts of ownership of mobile money account on farm input expenditures: A micro perspective from rural maize farmers in Ghana

This article investigates the distributional impact of mobile money account ownership on farm input expenditures among maize farmers in southern Ghana. Using cross-sectional data from 1044 farm households, we employed an instrumental variable quantile regression to account for endogeneity and selection bias. We find that socioeconomic, spatial location, and institutional factors significantly influence male and female-headed household decisions to own mobile money accounts. The empirics show that male-headed households spend more on fertilizer and pesticide relative to female-headed households. Mobile money account ownership increases fertilizer expenditure in male-headed households more than female-headed households. Male-headed families with mobile money accounts spend 13.9% and 6.5% more on fertilizer at the 40th and 60th quantiles. High 80th quantile female-headed households spend 4.3% more on fertilizer. For male-headed households, farming experience and education positively influence mobile money account ownership on fertilizer expenditure, while off-farm activity at the 40th quantile positively influences female-headed households. Our results distill useful policy implications that call for concerted efforts targeted at digital financial inclusion with an eye to bridging differential gender gaps.