Making Finance Work for Women

Women's financial inclusion has advanced at an unprecedented scale. According to the latest Global Findex data, 73% of women in low- and middle-income economies now hold financial accounts. Digital public infrastructure, mobile money, and government-to-person payment systems have reduced first-order barriers and brought millions of women into formal finance.

Yet 700 million women still lack access. Reaching the last mile will require fundamentally new approaches. 

And for the millions of women who have already gained access, a harder question is emerging: does the financial system actually work for them once they are included?

From Access to Outcomes

Account ownership is expanding, but women’s engagement is often shallow, and meaningful use remains uneven.  Women-led enterprises face structural constraints: they have limited asset ownership and collateral, typically seek smaller loan sizes, tend to bank with informal operations, face sectoral segregation, experience time poverty, and often have constrained decision-making power. When crises strike — whether pandemics, climate events, or economic downturns — women fall behind faster and recover more slowly.

This pattern tells us something important: access alone is not translating into meaningful outcomes like greater resilience, stronger enterprises, and economic power. The root causes are embedded in how markets function and how institutions define risk differently for men and women. To truly achieve these outcomes, CGAP believes that it requires systemic change across three areas: data as infrastructure for change, confronting gender norms and institutional blind spots, and collective action that reshapes banking for women.

Data (as Infrastructure for Change)

One of the most persistent blind spots in financial systems is the failure to "see" women clearly. Most financial institutions are not built to analyze performance by gender. Core banking systems prioritize transaction sizes, portfolio yield, and operational efficiency — but rarely track how women and men experience products differently.

Gathering supply-side gender-disaggregated data is therefore not a reporting exercise. It is building the foundational infrastructure to identify where women drop off along the customer lifecycle, detect disparities in approval rates and pricing, understand women's contribution to portfolio performance, and design products aligned with women's actual economic realities. CGAP’s work with regulators in Rwanda is helping regulators and providers use gender disaggregated data to see what today is invisible.

Confronting Gender Norms and Institutional Blind Spots

Financial systems are not neutral. They reflect the norms of the societies in which they operate — shaping how women are perceived as borrowers, entrepreneurs, and economic actors. These gender norms influence who can offer collateral, which sectors are considered viable, how risk and ambition are assessed, and who controls financial decisions within households. Exclusion often arises not from explicit discrimination, but from institutional definitions of what a "real business" looks like — definitions that mirror male-dominated economic trajectories.  

CGAP's resources help funders and market actors to diagnose gender norms and design interventions to address this root cause of exclusion in their programming. For financial institutions, CGAP has developed guidelines to build organizational capacity and integrate a gender perspective into their operations and products.

Regulatory institutions face a parallel challenge – CGAP analysis shows regulations may appear gender-neutral but in practice have deeply gendered effects. With a deeper understanding of norms, regulators will be better positioned to promote women's inclusion while maintaining the stability of the financial system.

Collective Action that Reshapes Banking for Women

CGAP is supporting national coalitions in Mexico, Morocco, and India — bringing together governments, regulators, financial institutions, and other actors to address structural gender barriers through coordinated, sustained action. We hope these countries' experiences will inspire others.

These country platforms address the coordination failure at the heart of women's financial inclusion. Rather than siloed projects or fragmented reforms, they are multi-stakeholder coalitions — typically convened under government leadership — that align policy, private sector action, and shared evidence around a common diagnosis. By embedding gender into national economic priorities, they create conditions for systemic, scalable change.

CGAP also convenes FinEquity, a global community of more than 8,600 researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and donors. Hosted by FinDev, FinEquity provides a trusted, neutral platform that fosters collaboration by facilitating evidence-sharing, peer learning, and collective action to make financial services more accessible, responsive, and effective for women worldwide.

Meeting Women Where They Are

Systemic reform must go hand in hand with a more nuanced understanding of the women it serves. Understanding which strategies work for diverse groups such as young women, women nano-entrepreneurs, women gig workers, and rural women engaged in agriculture, is essential to ensuring that the progress of the last decade carries forward into the next.