Thank you to NetGalley and River Grove books for the opportunity to review this book.
Rosa Wang is working towards expanding digital banking to the last mile customers - the remote, the poor and where possible female customers.

“The Future is Already Here - It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed” - William Gibson.

What worked for me -
- Learning that mobile phone ownership can happen before having a personal source of electricity
- Seeing the personal stories of female entrepreneurs and their micro-financing communities
- Learning about the technical advances such as national identification systems for finger print recognition or iris scanning to permit marginalized citizens to establish their identity to open a bank account and receive government support or voice technology to overcome illiteracy.

What didn’t work for me -
- The scope didn’t seem well defined - is this a book about digital banking or mobile phones?
- The writing style - focusing on individuals country by country, over time, felt repetitive.
- The epilogue didn’t further clarify the challenges that technology helps address.

Overall Rating - 3/5

I would recommend this book to anybody that is working on correcting their own biases and wants to ensure greater equality in opportunities for all.

First off, this is an important book! It's an eye opener on how mobile phones are empowering women to do business, bank their money, and open their worlds to possibilities. That alone would be enough of a reason to read this book, but Rosa Wang has also done a wonderful job with storytelling--both her own and others. That makes this book very readable. I imagine some prospective readers might be worried that this book would have too many statistics and be rather dry. But, I assure you it is not. Wang describes each location, gives us a visual with a simple map, and does not neglect to tell us the culture of each location and how that impacts her work. I think that those of us living in the western world would be smart to read this book to see the power of a mobile phone... and then imagine what else could be accomplished.