On Our Radar: July 2023

Despite recent attention in the media, progress in closing the gender pension gap in most countries has halted. These sources point to a stark disparity in retirement outcomes, with women receiving pensions that are between 25% to 30% lower than those of men. This World Bank blog explores the reasons behind the gender pension gap and suggests a multi-faceted approach to address existing gaps.

This Women’s World Banking publication spotlights their women-centered design methodology. It provides a set of key design principles along with practical case studies to equip financial inclusion stakeholders, including financial services providers, with the knowledge and confidence to use women-centered design to develop financial products and services that truly work for women.

Women join gig platforms in a quest for greater flexibility and increased income. However, they face obstacles in leveraging these opportunities. Further, platform-based financial services for gig workers have been on the rise, but most of them do not reach women, inhibiting their financial inclusion. In this CGAP blog, Nisha Singh and Gayatri Murthy outline the triple barriers women face in leveraging the growth opportunities in the platform ecosystem. 

Beginning in June 2022, myAgro partnered with CGAP to investigate why women's uptake of its agricultural input layaway services in Senegal lagged behind its operations in neighboring Mali. They found that sociocultural norms dictating household decision-making, agricultural activities, and financial behaviors often prevent rural women in Senegal from accessing formal financial and agricultural services such as those provided by myAgro. In response, CGAP supported myAgro to design and launch two pilots aimed at addressing these gendered social norms. This blog shares early insights into how companies can more effectively serve rural women.

CARE’s Women’s Entrepreneurship programming aims to reduce barriers that women entrepreneurs face by offering a combination of services – both financial and non-financial – that are essential to creating sustainable growth and empowerment for women entrepreneurs. CARE partnered with 60 Decibels and Mission Measurement - who represented Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth – to perform a specialized lean impact study across Vietnam, Pakistan, and Peru to measure core business themes and capture the impact of the CARE Women’s Entrepreneurship program.

This playbook articulates certain principles that help in designing financial apps more inclusively for women and to help improve their Digital Financial Capabilities. The guidelines shared are intended to help build gender-intentional fintech solutions that improve access and usage among women users.