Searching: Research & Analysis

Young Women's Financial Inclusion: What Works

This paper summarizes nearly two decades of learning to help practitioners realize the social and business case for financially including young women. It presents customized strategies covering product design, delivery, financial capability building, and social intermediation to address the needs of different segments in this diverse and critical client group.

8 Billion Reasons: Inclusive Finance as a Catalyst for Climate Action

We cannot tackle climate change effectively without inclusive financial services. CGAP outlines five areas for collaborative action between stakeholders working on climate change and those working on inclusive finance in order to leverage inclusive finance to scale grassroots climate action.

Supply-Side Gender Disaggregated Data for Advancing Financial Inclusion: Insights and Areas for Further Research

Gender data is key for unlocking the potential of financial inclusion. This report explores the ways supply-side gender-disaggregated data (S-GDD) is being used to inform financial policies and strategies that seek to intentionally apply a gender lens.

The Impact of Financial Inclusion on Young Women’s Well-being: A Survey of Evidence and Recommendations for Practitioners

Young women face many gender-based barriers as they navigate major life transitions, with life-long effects. A new CGAP Working Paper finds that in addition to improving financial skills and savings levels, financial inclusion initiatives may also improve health and livelihood outcomes when combined with other interventions.

Bolstering Women’s Climate Resilience and Adaptation through Financial Services

Financial services help people to reduce the impact of and to adapt to climate-related risks. Yet women have less access to such tools. This working paper illustrates how women are differently impacted by climate change and how financial services can play a better role in strengthening their autonomous adaptive capacities to climate change.

Strengthening Rural Women’s Climate Resilience: Opportunities for Financial and Agricultural Service Providers

Rural women are critical to ensuring global food security but disproportionately vulnerable to climate change. In this working paper, CGAP and Mercy Corps AgriFin provide an overview of 10 opportunities for service providers, investors, and donors to improve rural women’s climate resilience and share examples of innovative business solutions.

Resilient Rural Women: Applying Personas and Insights for Climate-Smart Innovation

This deck explores three personas of rural women and their distinct customer journeys through product and service engagement. It aims to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities rural women face—including in the context of climate change. 

Global Landscape: Data Trails of Digitally Included Poor (DIP) People

Many low-income people generate rich data trails that are not being fully leveraged in the design and delivery of financial services. CGAP's reading deck puts a spotlight on the specific data trails generated by digitally included yet poor people, the sources of these data trails, and variations of data trails across different segmentations.

Emerging Trends in National Financial Inclusion Strategies that Support Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurs continue to face persistent gender-based barriers that impede their success – such as unequal access to financial accounts, constrained credit, and normative roles that keep women in the role of primary caregivers. Improved financial inclusion can help reduce some of these barriers. This WBL-CGAP Brief presents data collected by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project on how National Financial Inclusion Strategies can spur policy and regulatory reforms in support of women’s entrepreneurship. 

Young Women and Financial Services: Maximizing Impact

Research has shown that marginalized young women can benefit from financial services in both economic and non-economic ways. But with over half a billion women aged 15-24 in the world, the life stages, needs, and contexts of this population are tremendously diverse. Among which segments of young women could investments in improved financial services make the most impact? This infographic highlights findings from a recent CGAP segmentation exercise.