ABSTRACT Rapid growth in digital finance has expanded credit access for rural smallholders, yet financial capability has not kept pace with access. Where fee structures are opaque and search is costly, this gap raises the risk of expensive borrowing in digital financial services. This paper assesses whether a video‐based financial knowledge intervention affects stated willingness to pay for digital credit. Using contingent valuation with a payment card approach, we measure willingness to pay before and after information provision among 694 smallholder households in Meru County, Kenya. Our results show that the video intervention reduced the monthly interest rate that smallholders are willing to pay by 1.4 percentage points. This finding suggests that the intervention increased sensitivity to borrowing costs and reduced stated tolerance for higher‐priced digital credit. It also provides policy‐relevant evidence that brief, targeted video prompts can complement consumer‐protection measures by shifting stated credit choices toward lower interest‐rate categories.
Nsengumuremyi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.