Gender Toolkit: Micro, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprise Finance and Development

This tool kit on gender and MSME finance and development has been designed to guide staff and users in identifying and addressing key gender issues in relevant programs and projects. It is intended to help users build gender-inclusive design elements in programs and projects in MSME finance or sector development. The tool kit includes a set of tools and gender-responsive good practice examples from ADB's portfolio and elsewhere.The tool kit comprises eight chapters. Chapter 1 summarizes why gender equality matters in the MSME sector finance and development and the related global commitments and initiatives. Chapter 2 shows how different operational tools in ADB can be used to make its MSME sector support more gender-inclusive and -responsive. Chapters 3–-7 provide key gender issues and tips to designing gender-inclusive features and actions. And chapter 8 presents indicative gender performance indicators that can be included in the project gender action plans and policy matrices. Case studies from ADB's project and program portfolio have also been included to illustrate concrete examples of mainstreaming gender in MSME finance projects and programs.