Digital Financial Awareness and Sustainability Outcomes among Women in Vulnerable Communities in Andhra Pradesh

Abstract

Background: A significant number of women in India continue to be left out of the formal financial systems and hence are unable to move towards sustainable livelihoods. Digital financial services are being touted as a promising tool for inclusion; however, the evidence to suggest that this leads to multidimensional sustainability outcomes—particularly for marginalized women—is weak. Andhra Pradesh, being a state with varied rural, tribal, and semi-urban settings allows us to study this association.
Methods: The study was a cross-sectional quantitative study conducted in 2024 among 280 at-risk women between the ages of 18 and 60 from six districts of Andhra Pradesh, by applying multistage stratified random sampling. Digital financial literacy was assessed with a validated 10-item Likert-scale tool (Cronbach’s α = 0.847). We measured sustainability outcomes in terms of economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Analysis techniques included descriptive statistics, paired sample t-tests for a sub-sample who received a digital financial literacy intervention, tests for multi-collinearity, and multiple regression analysis with socio-demographic variables as control variables.