Financial decision-making, gender and social norms in Zambia

This project aims to investigate the social norms that guide and constrain the financial decision-making of Zambian men and women. It also aims to explore ways of incorporating knowledge about these norms into financial services, financial literacy programmes and policy design. Using recently developed methods drawn from behavioural and experimental economics, which have been especially adapted for this project, we will identify the content of a range of social norms relating to money holding, money use and money management and quantify the strength of those social norms. In addition, we will investigate the extent to which such social norms are gender-specific and whether the social norms that women acknowledge as guides to the way that they should behave differ from the social norms that men think should be guiding women’s behaviour and vice-versa. Finally, we will investigate whether such social norms vary across ethnic groups (tribal groupings within the Zambian context). (Photo copyright: Financial Sector Deepening Zambia). 

 

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