If you build it, will they come? Incentivizing the Adoption of Digital Financial Services in Niger

Despite the potential impacts of digital financial services (DFS) on household welfare, adoption rates remain low in some of the world’s poorest countries. A key question is whether households face behavioral or information frictions that marginal incentives can overcome, and how these interact with uneven supply. To investigate this, we implemented a randomized controlled trial in Niger to estimate the causal effect of information provision and financial incentives on DFS adoption and subsequent welfare outcomes. We further integrate spatial data on agent networks to assess the role of supply-side constraints as barriers to market penetration. The results indicate that relaxing information asymmetries increases awareness but does not shift adoption behavior, consistent with models in which information is a necessary but not sufficient condition for technology diffusion. By contrast, a modest financial transfer acts as a salient incentive, generating a statistically significant increase in both adoption and usage, and allows households to smooth consumption in the face of shocks. This suggests that both liquidity constraints and present-biased preferences may be binding impediments to diffusion.