As India charts its course toward Viksit Bharat 2047—its aspiration to attain developed-nation status by the 100th anniversary of independence—it will need a financial system that not only includes women but strengthens their economic power by giving them control over money, decisions, and assets at every life stage.
Over the past decade, India has transformed access to finance by building core digital public infrastructure—most notably Aadhaar—launching the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana ( PMJDY) to make bank accounts ubiquitous and using direct benefit transfers (DBT) to route funds into those accounts. The private sector has built on these rails. Today, nearly every household has a bank account, and digital payments are routine, making India one of the most inclusive financial systems in the world.
Yet a quieter reality remains. Women, across income levels, professions, and regions, often remain on the margins of meaningful financial engagement. Their names appear on accounts, but they don’t always make decisions on how money is saved, spent, borrowed, or invested. Many accounts in women’s names lie dormant, and women struggle to access suitable loans to start or grow their enterprises. If India’s ambition of Viksit Bharat 2047 is to be realized, finance must become a tool that unlocks women’s economic power at scale.
If India brought more women fully into its economy, the gains could be transformative. Goldman Sachs estimates that returning labor force participation to its previous peak could add 1 percentage point to annual growth, while TeamLease Foundation analysis suggests that giving women an equitable share of jobs could lift economic growth by 1.5 percentage points per year. Some IMF-based estimates indicate that closing gender gaps in economic participation could raise India’s GDP by nearly 27%. Taken together, these figures show that comprehensively including women in financial and economic systems is not a marginal reform. It is one of the largest untapped drivers of India’s long-term growth and is central to its future.
Reimagining women’s financial pathways
For years, “inclusion” has been equated to accounts opened, credit disbursed, or transactions made. But access alone cannot drive empowerment. The real question is whether finance serves women’s lives in a meaningful way.
India’s delivery architecture for women’s finance has been built on collective models such as self-help groups (SHGs) and joint liability groups (JLGs). For decades, these were a breakthrough, offering solidarity, first-time credit, and social capital. But as women’s aspirations grow, the pathway often stalls. There is little data on progression from collective to individual finance, from micro to enterprise, or from modest savings to long-term wealth creation. A woman may want to grow a business, invest in education, or purchase assets in her name, yet there are limited signs that the system grows with her.
Moreover, women’s lives are rarely linear. They move between learning, paid work, caregiving, and entrepreneurship, often all at once. Sometimes personal breaks and exits from the economy slow down women’s progress, even if they have the potential and ambition. The financial system, however, is built for straight lines: study, work, save, retire. Products presume stable earnings and uninterrupted histories that do not fit the rhythms of most women’s lives. If women’s lives and livelihoods are dynamic and ever evolving, their financial journeys must be just as adaptive.
The next phase of policy and market design for women’s finance must recognize women not as a single “beneficiary group” but as individuals with ambitions, transitions, and evolving needs – a prerequisite for achieving Viksit Bharat 2047. Achieving this shift means rethinking what truly enables women to progress and taking targeted action across a few core areas – the levers that can turn financial inclusion into genuine participation and long-term security.
Three levers for women’s financial empowerment
Data and visibility
Women remain undercounted in the data that guides policy and product design. Joint accounts, household reporting, and informal income often hide women’s individual activity, so what isn’t seen isn’t prioritized. Beyond gender tags, this means seeing women’s economic lives as they unfold. Systems(both inside banks and connecting into them) should track key transitions—such as SHG to individual credit or cash to in-her-name deposits—so that progress is visible. Providers can use existing data and better signals to understand women as customers and offer timely, relevant products.
Digital connectivity
India’s digital revolution has reshaped finance, but the risk of a digital divide persists. Many women lack consistent device ownership, affordable data, or reliable connectivity. Even with access, low awareness, safety concerns, and weak recourse erode trust. Designing predictable digital systems, where women can transact confidently and recover quickly from errors, is essential for turning digital progress into women’s economic power.
Asset ownership
Asset ownership is the foundation of financial power, yet women are far less likely to hold land, housing, equipment, or long-term savings in their names. Joint or informal arrangements weaken bargaining power and block collateralized credit. Strengthening women’s ownership begins with making it visible and verifiable, through clearer inheritance pathways, more consistent titling practices, and better links between identity and assets.
Financing women’s economic empowerment: a shared mandate
India’s inclusion decade built the rails. The task now is to ensure women use these rails to advance their goals—with visibility in data, participation in digital systems, and assets that anchor security. In a country as large and diverse as India, real progress will require collective action that centers women’s realities, measures what shifts their economic power, and designs finance that adapts to changing roles and aspirations.
CGAP aims to catalyze this shift by convening influential actors around evidence, policy, and practice to shape a shared pathway and move from vision to action toward a broader goal: a financial system that strengthens women’s economic power as India moves toward Viksit Bharat 2047.
The true measure of progress isn’t how many women have accounts, but how many can use finance to build security, exercise choice, and shape their futures. As India realizes its ambitions, the task is to turn an inclusion decade into one of empowerment—so women can power their ambitions and drive the nation’s growth.
In the following blogs in this series, we will provide an in-depth analysis of the three key levers and examine how they facilitate progress and the roles of different stakeholders.
Add new comment