At first sight, the patterns in young people’s access to and usage of financial services found in the 2025 Findex data look strikingly similar to those in the 2021 Findex. At that time, CGAP analysis revealed an emerging gender gap in financial services just as young people enter adulthood in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In 2025, gender gaps still emerge at roughly the same ages, around 19 years old for account ownership and as early as 15 for usage.
Yet a closer look at the 2025 numbers reveals cause for optimism about young women’s usage of financial services, and some interesting changes in how and why they seem to be using them. Between 2021 and 2025, usage among young women (ages 15–24) rose from 30.4% to 39.3%, an increase of nearly 9 percentage points. Most of that progress was driven by women aged 19–24, a large proportion of whom are at the stage of transitioning from school to work and beginning to manage income or social benefits.
Usage also increased among young men — from 40.4% to 44.6% — but the growth was smaller, about 4 percentage points. As a result, the gender gap in usage narrowed sharply, from about 10 percentage points to just 5.3. The question is: why?
Digging deeper: what changed — and what didn’t
Across 2025 and 2021 data, four factors stood out as the strongest predictors of financial services usage among young people:
- Higher education
- Mobile ownership
- Receiving a wage
- Government transfers
For the first three predictors above, there were no substantial changes in their levels or gender gaps between Findex rounds.
The only area showing clear progress was internet access, in which the gender gap narrowed markedly. But as shown in the figure below, internet access is a relatively weak predictor of usage, and its influence does not differ by gender.
So, if the major drivers have not changed, what explains the narrowing gap in how young women use financial services?
A clue from the data: when transfers matter more
Analyzing how each factor affects the likelihood of using an account reveals an important insight: In the 2025 data, government transfers had a significantly stronger effect on financial services usage for young women than for young men. This pattern wasn’t visible in 2021, when transfers contributed similarly to usage across genders. The shift suggests that among young women, transfers increasingly act as a trigger for engagement with the financial system — encouraging active account use even when other endowments remain unchanged.
Interestingly, this happened while the overall share of young women receiving transfers has declined. In fact, the share of young people receiving government transfers has declined across the board — from 16.0% to 10.8% for young women, and 13.2% to 10.0% for young men. This finding points to a shift in both level and nature: fewer women may be receiving transfers, but those who do are engaging more deeply with financial services as a result.
Meanwhile, other drivers have equalized
At the same time, the effects of higher education and wage income — previously stronger among young men — have equalized between genders. In the 2021 data, receiving a wage disproportionately increased young women’s usage, while higher education was disproportionately important for young men’s usage. In the 2025 data, there were no detectable differences across genders for either factor.
This suggests a broader structural change: today, a woman with a tertiary education or wage income has roughly the same likelihood of using financial services as a man with similar characteristics. These subtle shifts hint at an environment where, for certain subsegments of young women, usage may be increasingly determined by opportunity rather than gender per se — though differences in labor market participation and informality continue to shape the outcomes of young women overall.
Putting the pieces together
So, what explains the progress in usage among young women between 2021 and 2025, in an environment where the key endowments have remained largely stable?
- The strength of effects has changed: government transfers now play a much bigger role for women, while the relative impacts of higher education and wage receipt for men have decreased.
- The most visible progress occurred among 19–24-year-olds, precisely the age when many young people have entered higher education and/or begin managing income or benefits.
Though gender gaps in higher education and wage receipt still exist, those young women who can access these endowments behave increasingly like their male counterparts. But young women’s usage is disproportionately impacted by receiving government transfers, suggesting the outsized importance of this use case for a certain subsegment of young women. As transfer recipients tend to have limited access to higher education and wages, transfer programs may be providing an alternate pathway to build financial behaviors — such as depositing, withdrawing, or mobile transactions — for this segment.
Beyond the numbers: what this means for policy
The narrowing usage gap among young women, together with the stronger effect of government transfers, shows that young women can be engaged users of financial services if presented with compelling use cases. The emerging evidence suggests that social protection systems are increasingly intertwined with financial inclusion outcomes for marginalized young women. In fact, World Bank research shows that many social assistance benefits are now paid digitally into women’s bank or mobile money accounts, improving their account usage and enabling them to retain greater control over the transfers. This aligns with recent meta-analysis evidence from the Center for Global Development covering 85 studies and more than 200,000 women across 42 LMICs, which found strong effects of unconditional cash transfers on women’s savings, assets, and expenditures.
The Findex data, while not definitive, hints at narrower targeting that may have magnified the effect among this more select group of beneficiaries. Especially in environments where opportunities for employment and wages are differentiated by both gender and life stage, government transfer programs can build young women’s comfort and familiarity with using financial services – a skill that will support their lifelong livelihood journeys. In addition to the income flowing through accounts, this familiarity makes young women a more attractive segment for commercial financial service providers, and points to the potential of partnerships between the public and private sectors to make government transfers a pathway into effective financial inclusion for young women.
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