Scoping Review Reveals How Mobile Phones Reshape Gender, Livelihoods, and Poverty Across the Global South

A single device in the hand of a smallholder farmer, a market trader, or a rural woman can alter the trajectory of an entire household’s income, and a major new scoping review has now mapped exactly how that transformation happens—and where it stalls. Researchers from the University of Pretoria and Werabe University examined 92 peer-reviewed studies and official reports spanning Africa, Asia, and South America, published between 2010 and 2024, to assess how mobile-based digital technologies influence adoption decisions, livelihood diversification, gender equality, and poverty reduction in developing regions. Their synthesis, published in SN Social Sciences, delivers one of the most comprehensive pictures to date of the mobile revolution’s uneven geography, showing that regions of the Global South have each achieved distinct victories—e-commerce leadership in Asia, mobile money dominance in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a nearly closed gender gap in South America—yet none has achieved universal success, and the obstacles that remain are as much structural and social as they are technological.

The review was deliberately broad in scope. Rather than a narrow systematic review focused on a single population or intervention, the authors employed PRISMA-ScR guidelines to capture the breadth and diversity of evidence across three continents. Starting from 1,387 records identified in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, the team screened out 81 non-English documents, 775 conference papers, books, theses, and other ineligible formats, and 439 irrelevant or inaccessible studies, ultimately retaining 92 sources: 77 original journal articles, 7 review articles, and 8 official reports. Fifty-eight studies were quantitative, 22 qualitative, 4 mixed-methods, and 8 were official reports. Geographically, Asia contributed 30 studies, Africa 27, South America 9, with the remainder drawn from Europe, North America, Australia, and global datasets. The authors note that roughly 83% of the included literature appeared between 2020 and 2024, signaling rapidly accelerating scholarly interest in digital adoption as a development lever aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

To organize this heterogeneous evidence, the researchers combined two established theoretical engines. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, in its consumer-focused UTAUT2 extension, explains adoption through performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, while the Sustainable Livelihood Framework describes how households mobilize physical, social, financial, human, and natural capital to pursue livelihood strategies. Gender was modeled as a mediating factor, drawing on Naila Kabeer’s empowerment framework—resources, agency, and achievements—and on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which highlights that benefits and burdens from technology are not distributed uniformly across populations. Together, these lenses allowed the review to connect the micro-level decision to buy a phone with macro-level outcomes such as income diversification and multidimensional poverty.

The headline finding is a starkly divided digital geography. As of 2023, only Africa and the Arab states still relied predominantly on 3G networks while other regions had moved to 4G and 5G. Africa has the lowest mobile phone adoption rate at 63%, meaning 37% of its population remains without a handset, followed by South America at 72%. Mobile internet penetration shows the same pattern: only about 37% of Africans use mobile internet, compared with 65% in South America, while fewer than 10% of Europeans lack access to either. Perhaps most telling is the gap between phone ownership and actual internet use—26 percentage points in Africa, versus 7 in South America and 9 in Asia—a divide the authors attribute to weak 4G and 5G infrastructure that keeps users tethered to basic phones and constitutes a second-level digital divide. Rural-urban disparities compound the problem: the ratio of urban to rural mobile internet use stands at 2.5 in Africa, 1.5 in the Asia-Pacific region, 1.22 in the Americas, and just 1.04 in Europe, meaning African rural users face the widest connectivity chasm in the Global South.

Gender emerges as one of the review’s most consequential threads. The gender gap in mobile ownership is 15% in South Asia, 13% in Africa excluding North Africa, and a strikingly low 1% in South America. In mobile internet use, South Asia narrowed its gender gap from 41% in 2017 to 31% in 2023, largely credited to initiatives in India improving women’s online access, while Sub-Saharan Africa’s gap barely budged, sliding only from 34% to 32% over the same period. The evidence goes deeper than statistics: married women show significantly lower adoption and use of mobile devices than married men, and women are more likely than men to depend on borrowing someone else’s phone to access information—a pattern the authors link to patriarchal control over resources and the confinement of women to unpaid household labor. Expanding women’s access, they argue, would rebalance household bargaining power, expand skills and social networks, and open employment pathways, making gender-sensitive digital inclusion a central poverty intervention rather than a peripheral concern.

Along agricultural value chains, the review documents how phones function as production and marketing infrastructure. In Tanzania’s pastoral communities, mobile phones facilitated communication vital for cattle farming; in South Africa, they gave smallholders access to extension advice, money transfers, pasture management tips, weather updates, and input application guidance; in China, farmers used mobile apps for farm management, market information, and extension training that boosted production and income. Yet intensity of use varies enormously between and within countries. Farmers in China, India, Kenya, and South Africa deploy advanced applications for production and marketing, while counterparts in Ethiopia and Peru primarily use phones for calls and messaging. Large-scale farmers consistently out-adopt smallholders in advanced applications, a gap the review attributes to digital skill deficits, affordability constraints, language barriers, and patchy network coverage. Intermediaries remain another bottleneck: rural African phone owners still depend heavily on middlemen who compress profit margins, whereas Asian e-commerce systems increasingly connect producers directly to consumers, and Latin American farmers have used phones to raise incomes by trimming transaction chains.

Financial inclusion is where Africa leads the world. Sub-Saharan Africa registers the highest mobile money adoption of any region, and the evidence reviewed shows measurable welfare consequences. In Kenya, digital financial services have improved rural poor livelihoods, raised per capita incomes, and lifted households out of poverty; classic research on Kenya’s mobile money revolution found it significantly enhanced households’ ability to share risk by slashing transaction costs, while other studies document its role in remittance flows across domestic and international borders. Comparative assessments rank mobile money as easier, safer, more trustworthy, more convenient, faster, and cheaper than traditional banking, and its reach into unbanked rural communities is credited with stimulating economic participation. By contrast, mobile money remains underutilized in Asia and especially South America, depriving marginal populations in infrastructure-poor areas of a proven tool—an asymmetry the review urges policymakers to correct through targeted promotion.

The poverty picture, however, is not uniformly rosy, and the review is candid about the reversals. Studies in selected Sub-Saharan African countries found that internet-enabled mobile phones were associated with increased poverty, and some economists argue that ICT-driven sectors reward skilled workers while trapping less-skilled laborers in low-paid jobs, deepening income inequality. Household budgets can suffer too, as communication expenditures divert money from food and necessities, and some research even links expanding phone coverage to increased violent conflict. On the livelihood side, phones open new economic opportunities, reduce risk exposure, lower transaction costs, and connect farmers to end users in India, South America, and beyond, but poor network coverage, unreliable electricity, low digital literacy, and constrained incomes blunt these gains, particularly in rural areas where over half of Africa’s population lives.

The authors’ conclusions amount to a policy agenda calibrated by region. For Sub-Saharan Africa, they prioritize expanding digital infrastructure, deepening mobile-based agricultural extension, building digital skills, and dismantling the affordability and gender barriers that keep women and smallholders offline. In South America, where empirical evidence remains thin and largely limited to English-language literature, they call for research and funding on mobile money and e-commerce adoption among women, low-income, and rural households. In Asia, attention should turn to gender-based and socioeconomic inequalities in access and to rural entrepreneurship. Across all three regions, they recommend regulatory support, targeted subsidies for underserved groups, digital platforms matched to local skill profiles, awareness campaigns, and electricity expansion. Their closing warning is stark: unless developing countries act decisively to close the mobile divide now, each new wave of technology will only widen the gap between individuals, businesses, countries, and continents.

Subject of Research: Mobile-based digital technology adoption, gender, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction in the Global South

Article Title: Mobile-based digital technology adoption, gender, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction in the Global South: a scoping review

Article References: Bule, D. L., Ntuli, H., Wale, E., & Nketiah, P. (2026). Mobile-based digital technology adoption, gender, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction in the Global South: a scoping review. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 459. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01749-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01749-2

Keywords: mobile technology adoption, digital divide, Global South, poverty reduction, livelihood diversification, gender gap, mobile money, e-commerce, smallholder farmers, digital infrastructure, financial inclusion, scoping review