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Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) is a mechanism of informal collaborative savings that is widely used across the globe. Despite its popularity and prevalence, it is not well-studied from HCI and CSCW perspectives. The global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS) for greater financial inclusion but there have not been any DFS-based interventions around ROSCAs. In this paper, we report a qualitative study involving 80 individuals to understand the dynamics of ROSCAs and opportunities for their digitization in the Pakistani context. We also present a smartphone-based Digital ROSCA platform designed on top of a simulated mobile money system. The platform was designed to be inclusive towards low-literate users. We present qualitative findings of its evaluation with 15 users (3 individual ROSCA groups). We find that digitization has the potential to support and strengthen traditional ROSCAs by mitigating issues like record-keeping, delayed payments, collection, distribution, and safety of money. It also allows the creation of payment history for individuals that can be used to score their financial credibility.

The intersection of Islam and gender affect technological and social interactions for Muslim women in significant ways and remains an understudied domain for CSCW and related fields. Building on 73 qualitative interviews with low-income women in Punjab, Pakistan, we analyze the complexity of family relationships and the subsequent dynamics of authority around technology uptake and usage by women within non-Western contexts, and, specifically, within the Islamic world. We argue that a Pakistani woman's experience with technology depends on many factors, including gendered roles, generational differences in a family, and wider socio-cultural and religious influences against the backdrop of a culturally conservative and patriarchal society. Our paper highlights the rich family dynamics, including key life events, that transform the roles of both Muslim women and their relatives. Our work is intended to inform scholars, practitioners within development agencies and industry, and other individuals studying technology and development about household dynamics that influence Muslim women's use of technology to encourage them to consider these dynamics during design and implementation processes for technological inclusion.

Worldwide, two billion people remain unbanked, the majority of whom reside in resource-constrained environments. While banks have limited reach due to high overhead costs of physical expansion, the global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS). However, access to mobile applications alone is insufficient to ensure their trial, adoption, or continued usage. In this paper, we report a three phase learnability evaluation (N=118) of smartphonebased mobile wallet applications conducted in Pakistan. We discuss ways in which previous exposure or domain knowledge improve learnability, and we recommend that metrics for learnability should include effectiveness and help sought, independent of usability. We also identify DFS adoption opportunities such as user readiness, interface improvements, and women's independence. All of these opportunities stem from awareness and understanding of relevance, which in our case occurred as a consequence of exposure to the application under evaluation.