FinDev Guide to Women’s Financial Inclusion and Economic Empowerment

This framework provides guidance to regulators and policymakers in developing policies and regulation to advance access to finance for women-led micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

Collecting financial inclusion gender data is essential for uncovering who is excluded, which financial products are used and by whom, how women’s financial needs differ from men’s and why products need to be accordingly adapted. This brief highlights how sex-disaggregated data can support women’s financial inclusion, looking at use cases in policy and regulation, program and product design, monitoring and evaluation.

How does access to financial services and other interventions impact women’s agency? This paper analyzes the evidence from 160 randomized controlled trials and quasi-experiments in low- and middle-income countries to summarize what we know about supporting women’s agency along with what needs additional research

This diagnostic aims to identify social norms that affect how women access, use, and benefit from financial services. By identifying actionable insights, practitioners can design interventions that target the root causes of consumer behaviors that limit the potential benefits of financial inclusion interventions for women.

This brief from the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab highlights evidence on mechanisms that can help protect the lives and livelihoods of women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and translates them into emergency response recommendations.

This brief advises governments on how to digitize cash transfers in ways that proactively empower women and support their inclusion. It outlines why women are at heightened risk of exclusion during the rapid scaling and digitization of cash transfers, and offers concrete policy design options to mitigate exclusion risks and maximize impact. 

How can insurance companies support female employees, customers and agents during the pandemic? This guidance note highlights best practices and explains how women can contribute to the success of the insurance industry and how insurers can better engage with them during the crisis.

Through a mixed-methods analysis of a nearly 2,000-person survey and robust qualitative research, this research examines what influences beneficiaries’ use of accounts in Indonesia’s largest conditional cash transfer, Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH). It also provides recommendations for government-to-person (G2P) programs to ensure women can make informed decisions about the use of accounts.

Algorithm-enabled credit decisions have the potential to create a level playing field for female customers worldwide—but only if we find and mitigate biases emerging through technology inputs and processes. This report is part thought experiment and part primer, exploring the promises and pitfalls of using digital tools to open up new credit to women individuals and entrepreneurs. It explores two key questions: (1) Where does gender-based bias originate? (2) How do we mitigate such biases in the emerging digital credit space?

This brief examines design principles employed by two fintechs working in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing the potential of gender-aware design, and how to design for specific needs and constraints of women, while accounting for the norms that define their lives.

This report highlights 10 policy options to address the three main categories of barriers to accessing financial services for women and girls – lack of access to the basic requirements for financial inclusion, limited digital financial infrastructure and unequal laws and regulations.

This report shares the results of a randomized controlled trial conducted in rural Uganda from 2017 to 2019 to test the effectiveness of two interventions intended to help poor rural women with male partners maintain control over their own money and achieve a more equal role in household financial decision-making. The innovations tested were: (1) a mobile banking service with digital subwallet folders labelled for women and (2) the same service coupled with a course of seven household counselling sessions.

A survey of 168 fintechs and 30 investors provides insights about how fintechs have been approaching and serving the women’s market, iIlluminating gaps in gender disaggregated data, business case and use case development.