As access to meaningful digital connectivity increases globally, in many regions women’s ability to engage with digital tools continues to be shaped by barriers such as relevance of offerings, affordability, literacy, capability, and social norms. Quicksand and Stby are working on a project that explores these nuances in women’s digital engagement to identify personas that reflect women’s digital access and usage patterns. In this work we are supported by our Reach partners YUX, who have anchored field activities in all the countries that this work is being conducted in – Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. We have also partnered with Decodis, who have led a separate data collection effort in all the countries and informed the outputs of this work.
The Digital Persona’s project has been funded and supported by the Gates Foundation and builds on the household segmentation work conducted by the Pathways Project in Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. Using a novel design-driven approach, Pathways provides woman-centered data, evidence, and tools that uncover underlying vulnerabilities to poor health outcomes shaped by households’ social, economic, cultural, and environmental conditions. Contextualising and operationalizing the Pathway’s segments, the Digital Personas are design tracks that map the different ways in which women engage with digital technologies. They seek to answer the question – How do we leverage digital to improve women’s health, livelihoods and other outcomes?
Bringing women’s digital journeys to life through lived experience and data
The project uses a mixed-methods approach, combining small-sample, multi-round, in-depth qualitative and design research led by Quicksand,larger-sample qualitative research conducted by Decodis and analysis of population representative quantitative data from the DHS . Recognizing that women’s digital journeys unfold within social, cultural, and economic contexts has been fundamental to our work, both in the data collection, where we spoke not only to women but also to their family members and facilitators, and in the analytical frameworks we developed.
Working closely with our local partner YUX, our research brings to life women’s varied digital realities, exploring how women navigate digital technologies in their everyday routines and surfacing factors that enable or limit digital engagement. The insights from our research are co-analysed alongside population-representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS-7) data and the Pathways segmentation (also derived from DHS), ensuring the personas are both rooted in lived experiences and anchored in robust national-level data.
Digital Personas driving gender-intentional innovation
The personas we are developing serve as a bridge between research and implementation, capturing patterns of adoption, continuity and disruption, gatekeeping, safety practices, aspirations, and lived negotiations with norms. By making the human stories behind connectivity gaps visible, each persona expresses a mode of digital engagement rather than a fixed type of user, highlighting the pathways, constraints, and strategies through which women participate in the digital world.
The digital personas are intended to offer blueprints for those who are designing gender-intentional interventions, products and services that target women not as a homogenous whole but as distinct groups with differing needs, skills, and normative and financial realities. Anchoring design decisions in women’s diverse experiences supports the development of more effective and equitable initiatives, expanding opportunity and strengthening digital connectivity for those who stand to benefit most.
The final results are expected to be ready by early next year and will be publicly available for use.
(All photos in this article were taken by YUX during fieldwork in Senegal, Nigeria and Kenya.)