What happens after a financial institution agrees that serving women better matters? Early experience from CGAP’s collective action work in Mexico and Morocco suggests that financial sector coalitions can help answer that question but only when they are designed as mechanisms for institutional change, not just spaces for consensus-building or knowledge-sharing.
This is particularly relevant to women’s financial inclusion (WFI) because serving women better requires more than a new product or campaign. It demands institution-wide change across product design, distribution, data, staffing, incentives, leadership, and culture. For example, during one coalition session, a marketing officer realized she had always pictured a man when imagining a typical client. She had never noticed it before. That kind of shift in assumptions, not just in processes, is what WFI ultimately requires across the institution.
The implementation gap begins inside the institution
In Mexico, all 13 member financial institutions completed self-assessments and 12 developed action plans. In Morocco, 19 of 21 participating providers joined Design Lab tracks on human-centered design, data, and internal culture.
But plans do not guarantee change. Progress stalls when responsibility sits with one delegate rather than with the teams and leaders in charge of products, data, budgets, and staffing.
Four conditions must move together
CGAP experience in both countries points to four conditions for institutional change: evidence on women customers and feasible solutions; incentives strong enough to compete with other priorities; coordination across the functions needed to act; and authority and accountability from leaders who can remove barriers and allocate resources.
Coalitions can strengthen the forces supporting change while reducing anxiety and the pull of familiar routines by making action shared, sequenced, and less risky.
How coalitions can close the implementation gap
Move ownership from a delegate to an internal team
One committed delegate cannot carry a cross-institutional agenda alone. Within the Morocco coalition, every institution is asked to form a team across relevant functions. One provider that had previously declined technical assistance later joined the human-centered design track, assembled a team, committed to interview women customers, and planned five internal workshops. In Mexico, participants are using design-sprint methods internally, forming cross-functional groups, and some are briefing directors or boards. Coalitions gain traction when they create an internal vehicle for implementation rather than relying on an individual champion.
Break change into manageable steps
Broad commitments—improve data, redesign products, change culture—must be translated into smaller decisions. Morocco’s Design Lab combines practical tools with assignments that institutions apply between sessions. It also reveals where institutions get stuck: starting with existing products rather than women’s needs, collecting data without defining the decisions it should inform, or struggling to examine internal culture.
Mexico uses a similar rhythm of expert input and design sprints. By the sixth session (with sessions held every five weeks), institutions were turning broad plans into charters defining a specific initiative, its owners, and next steps. Two institutions formed internal groups to develop a diagnostic and pilot for a product serving underserved women.
Use bilateral follow-up to surface resistance early
Enthusiasm from group sessions takes time to permeate into institutions. In Morocco, about half of institutions were on schedule in May; others remained engaged but were behind, and the action-plan deadline moved to August. CGAP facilitators and Bank Al-Maghrib intensified bilateral follow-up and adjusted the timetable. Mexico uses similar check-ins to identify institution-specific constraints. Adaptive follow-up—not a rigid workshop sequence—keeps coalitions connected to implementation realities.
Activate senior sponsors throughout the process
Both coalitions made entry conditional on a signed commitment letter from a senior sponsor. Such a letter gives permission to begin, but not necessarily the decisions or resources to continue. Senior sponsors must regularly review plans, resolve cross-functional conflicts, assign accountability, and signal that the work remains a priority. Re-engaging them at defined milestones converts symbolic support into institutional authority.
Measure the path to change—not only the final outcome
Working groups, diagnostics, action plans, and charters are not proof that women customers are better served—ultimately, customer outcomes matter. But the interim steps are important indicators of an institution’s willingness and capacity to change. At this point, financial institutions in both markets are at varied stages of action. Several factors such as staff capacity, leadership buy-in, and the delegate’s own position in the organization influence the speed of progress. But a clear insight emerging is that each step of progress is important in such a management process and can be understood across three levels:
- Institutional capacity: teams, sponsors, staff time, budgets, and data use.
- Operational change: approved plans, redesigned products or journeys, and changed policies or practices.
- Customer and market outcomes: improved use, service quality, resilience, opportunity, and policy reform.
This staged view avoids dismissing meaningful early progress—or claiming success merely because plans and meetings exist.
What funders and policymakers should do differently
Funders should finance the architecture of change, not only visible end products. Facilitation, bilateral follow-up, diagnostics, evidence, and multi-year convening are the mechanisms that move institutions from commitment to implementation. Funding should recognize staged results and allow time for plans to become operational change.
Policymakers and regulators must do more than convene. They can signal priorities, connect institutional plans to national strategies, and use implementation evidence to identify market-wide barriers. This can turn separate institutional experiments into a feedback loop between practice and policy.
From useful conversation to institutional change
The early lesson from Mexico and Morocco is not that coalitions automatically change institutions, but that they can be designed to make change more likely. Evidence, incentives, cross-functional ownership, and senior accountability help bridge the difficult middle between commitment and results.
That is a more demanding role than convening, but also a more valuable one, where the focus shifts from those who attended the meeting to whether their institutions begin to make different decisions.
This piece is part of a broader CGAP effort to document lessons on making collective action for women’s financial inclusion work in practice. The framing adapts the Christensen Institute’s “Forces of Progress.”
This blog is also available in Spanish on FinEquityALC.
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