Authors: Jacqueline Klopp
Mobile phones present new opportunities to support cross-border traders in Africa in addressing corruption and harassment. This paper describes an experiment involving traders using a reporting feature on mobile phones to provide data on cross border experiences. Traders answered basic questions around payments, waiting time and overall comfort level of one cross border trip each week. Two hundred and eighteen traders were recruited to participate and received remote onboarding in June 2021.
From April 17th to 3 September 3rd 2021, we collected and tracked data from the reporting feature on a dashboard. We also conducted two surveys of all traders: one early on to gauge initial problems with using the platform and a final exit survey of users and non-users of the reporting feature. One hundred and ninety-nine participants stayed in the study with 87 becoming users of the reporting tool (44%) and 112 or (56%) who did not. Younger, more educated traders had a higher likelihood of using the reporting feature, suggesting more training and support would boost participation. Towards the end of the experiment, a core group of users were reporting in a regular, sustained way. Besides being too busy or forgetting to report, non-users explained barriers to participation including misunderstandings around compensation and/or the mistaken belief that reporting entailed costs.
A majority of all traders suggested that compensation or exchanging useful information from other traders would be necessary to incentivize sustained reporting.
