How Harmful Gender Norms Limit Women's Financial Inclusion
How Harmful Gender Norms Limit Women's Financial Inclusion
Why Financial Regulation Must Be Gender-Intentional
Why Financial Regulation Must Be Gender-Intentional
To tackle this, CGAP has developed tailored resources based on rigorous research to support funders, financial service providers, and financial regulators to move from gender-blind, to gender intentional approaches.
CGAP produced a practical framework to help development and market actors to understand and act on gender norms that restrict women's financial inclusion (WFI) and women's economic empowerment (WEE). This is accompanied by a series of practical guides for development actors (funders and market facilitators) to diagnose gender norms and design interventions in response, and a working paper with guidance for financial sector authorities.
Featured Publications
Gender norms shape the behavior of financial service providers, regulators, and communities, often limiting women’s access to and use of financial services. This Focus Note presents a practical framework, based on diagnostics in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, that classifies gender norms by their strength and prevalence and proposes tailored strategies for addressing them.
CGAP’s Diagnostic Guide helps development actors move beyond symptoms to address the root causes of women’s financial exclusion. This guide introduces a structured, field-tested approach to uncover how gender norms shape market actor behavior and offers practitioners a powerful set of tools for examining norms-driven constraints and identifying high impact intervention points.
CGAP’s Design Guide introduces a structured, field-tested approach to uncover how gender norms shape market actor behavior, to help development actors move beyond symptoms to address the root causes of women’s financial exclusion.
To advance women’s financial inclusion, financial regulators must recognize that men and women experience the financial sector differently. This working paper provides a framework to assess how regulation can impact men and women differently. It aims to motivate regulators to move from gender-blind, to gender intentional approaches.
Featured Blogs
Invisible gender norms shape how everyone in the financial system behaves. CGAP & FSD Network research in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda shows that making finance work for women means understanding those norms and how to intervene to change market actor behavior.
Intentionally embedding gender considerations into Indonesia’s peer-to-peer (P2P) and other fintech regulations and guidance could unlock new finance pathways for women entrepreneurs to access the finance they need to grow and thrive.
How do gender norms impact not just women’s behavior, but the behavior of all market actors in the financial system? Recent findings from Uganda offer some insights.
Despite progress, women in Mozambique remain less financially included than men. A GIZ, CGAP, and AMB study reveals deep-rooted gender norms as key barriers, sparking targeted efforts to reshape financial systems for women.
Gender norms create a financial system where women do not have the same access and opportunities as men. If funders want to go beyond closing the gender gap in access and build more equitable financial systems, they need to address them.
More Blogs
The recently revised FATF Standards create new opportunities to apply proportionate AML/CFT measures that recognize women’s generally lower risk, helping close the gender gap in financial inclusion if policymakers act intentionally.
COVID-19 is the latest reminder that the norms constraining women’s economic participation need to be addressed in global development efforts, including in financial inclusion.
Access to digital financial services is uneven for men and women. If implemented with gender in mind, the basic regulatory enablers of digital finance can increase women's financial inclusion.