Gender Bias In CST?

When Ghana’s Finance minister, Ken Ofori Atta, announced in mid-2019 that the Communication Service Tax – a usage tax levied on telecommunications companies or ‘telcos’ that primarily taxes mobile users for calls and data – was being increased from 6% to 9%, most people probably shrugged at the news. Until recently, consumers did not really notice the CST as it was mostly absorbed by the telcos.

This time around, the telcos were not going to bear the full cost of this tax increase and decided that they were going to charge consumers upfront. The government accused the telcos of trying to make them unpopular a year to an election. The telcos believed that they were already overtaxed as it is. Consumers were up in arms as they were not getting full value for their money – literally.

We gave Speakupp users the chance to free their mind on the issue and they did not disappoint. Almost 60% of poll respondents said that the CST increase – and by extension, the upfront charge from credit – had affected them very much and thus had an effect on their mobile experience compared to only 12.50% who said it had not affected them at all. Female respondents were hit pretty hard in particular. While only just over half of males who polled said that they were very affected by the increase, more than three-quarters of females (78%) replied in the same manner.

Even more interestingly, all respondents who responded this way were under the age of 35. Thus, the most affected group of all this happened to be females under the age of 35. This could also be the entrepreneur who utilizes the internet to sell products from clothes to shea butter. There may also be in this group the various business owners who contribute to Ghana having the highest percentage of female business owners in Africa.

Diving a bit deeper, we also noticed that a higher percentage of iPhone/iPad users (73%) were affected by the increase as compared to 55% of Android users. This could be as a result of users of these types of devices being slightly more affluent so in effect, they are heavier consumers of mobile data. Another nugget we can pick out is that 90% of these very affected users were female. This is really not going well for our ladies! It was only about 57% for the guys.

In summary, our findings show a lack of public engagement in how this tax was to be implemented. Younger and more likely affluent females bore the brunt of CST. What seemed to be non-discriminatory, universal policy tool had a gender bias. Government needs to improve engagement and to undertake pre-implementation impact assessments in order to balance out the interests of different groups to achieve its goals.

In response to public outcry, the upfront charging of credit has been discontinued. This was after our poll had ended.