How To Measure Women’s Economic Empowerment in Financial Inclusion: A Menu of Indicators
Highlights
- This working paper introduces a menu of 19 indicators to measure Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) within women’s financial inclusion (WFI) initiatives, developed through collaboration with experts and the FinEquity community. By using these indicators, stakeholders can generate evidence that demonstrates how WFI contributes to WEE, guiding more effective interventions.
- Insights from data collected across seven countries, involving close to 4,000 women, have informed the development and refinement of these indicators, ensuring their relevance across diverse contexts.
- The paper provides actionable steps for stakeholders, including funders and market facilitators, on how to incorporate these indicators into their monitoring and evaluation activities to better assess WEE outcomes from financial inclusion efforts and track meaningful changes in WEE over time.
Executive Summary
Developing and using commonly agreed-upon indicators to measure women’s economic empowerment (WEE) is critical to helping stakeholders understand the outcomes of increased women’s financial inclusion (WFI) across diverse interventions and contexts. These indicators provide insights into how outcomes can be achieved and help identify what works and what does not in advancing WEE through increased financial inclusion. Although several initiatives have aimed to create a more consistent approach to measuring WEE, a common framework with tested indicators and guidance for financial inclusion has yet to be established.
To help address this gap, in 2022 a core group of organizations came together to increase transparency around WEE definitions, curate practical tools for data collection and analysis, and identify and test a proposed menu of WEE indicators for financial inclusion. The proposed menu of indicators was published in 2023 and has since been tested across seven countries.
From 2022 through 2024, with support from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), CGAP collaborated with a core group of experts and the broader FinEquity community to develop and test this menu of indicators for measuring WEE within financial inclusion interventions.
This effort produced a menu of 19 indicators, developed and tested over a two-year period, spanning CGAP’s three intermediate outcomes of WEE:
- Access to Resources and Opportunities;
- Agency; and
- Achievements and Resilience.
This working paper offers practical guidance to stakeholders on how to periodically measure WEE using a proposed menu of indicators. By calculating these indicators, stakeholders can generate evidence of how increased WFI can contribute to WEE. Additionally, ongoing feedback from the use of these indicators will help adapt and improve them over time, ensuring they remain relevant and effective within diverse contexts.
Funders, market facilitators, and other development actors with specific objectives related to WFI and WEE are encouraged to incorporate the proposed indicators and survey questions into their monitoring and evaluation activities. Market actors, including financial service providers (FSPs), networks and investors, are also encouraged to integrate relevant indicators into their monitoring tools and processes to measure changes in WEE over time. To ensure meaningful insights, the proposed indicators should align with the specific context and women’s economic empowerment theory of change (TOC).