Gender and Digital Financing

The Task Force considered how digital financing can and is impacting on particular SDGs, including those relating to gender. For more information read the Working Paper published by UN Women on Leveraging Digital Finance for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. 

Key highlights: 

Digital finance improves women’s access to secure, affordable financial services and can better enable investors to direct investment towards women’s empowerment.

  • Digital services overcome barriers women face in accessing finance, such as lack of collateral or formal bank records. Mobile payments providers for small businesses, such as Kopo Kopo in Kenya, offer merchants cash advances, based on digital transaction records. The business owner repays electronically based on the day’s revenues. Pay-as-you-go systems reduce time spent fetching wood or water and ecommerce opportunities can be compatible with family responsibilities.
  • Building digital capabilities: In Tanzania and Mozambique a partnership between TechnoServe, the ExxonMobil Foundation and Vodacom is trialing a combination of mobile savings account with business skills training for urban businesswomen, using a combination of face to face access and interactive mobile learning platform. The training leads to women saving and taking out microloans through mobile accounts.
  • Data for smart gender budgeting: Austria is a world leader in gender budgeting with requirements to set and report against gender-related outcomes and integrate them into performance contracts, and impact assessments. A web portal publishes sex disaggregated data and budget information and offers a gender and diversity atlas.
  • Digitalization can support the collection of sex-disaggregated data critical for informing gender-sensitive public and private investment strategies. ‘Gender lens investing’ includes investment strategies that aim at advancing women in finance and corporate leadership, supporting products to improve women’s lives, and improving women’s treatment in the workplace. More sex-disaggregated data can further improve the ability to better serve women clients. It also contributes to growing evidence on the positive relationship between gender equality and financial performance.
  • The digitalization of social protection programmes can positively impact the way women participate in economies. It can provide women with independent access to predictable income streams and give female recipients greater control over how the money will be used within households.

It is critical that digital financing solutions are grounded in the reality of the challenges women faced. Lack of affordable devices, data, skills and social norms such as online harassment prevent women accessing the digital world.

The Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) has developed a Policy framework for women’s financial inclusion using digital financial services. It includes guidance on policy, regulation, infrastructure and demand side capabilities and consumer protection. UNSGSA is collaborating with Melinda Gates and the French Minister of Finance to promote a major G7 Partnership for Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa. Efforts to improve sex-disaggregated statistics include work by UNSGSA, UN Women, Data2X, World Bank, AFI, IMF.

 

 

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The Task Force considered how digital financing can and is impacting on particular SDGs, including those relating to gender. For more information read the Working Paper published by UN Women on Leveraging Digital Finance for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. 

Key highlights: 

Digital finance improves women’s access to secure, affordable financial services and can better enable investors to direct investment towards women’s empowerment.

  • Digital services overcome barriers women face in accessing finance, such as lack of collateral or formal bank records. Mobile payments providers for small businesses, such as Kopo Kopo in Kenya, offer merchants cash advances, based on digital transaction records. The business owner repays electronically based on the day’s revenues. Pay-as-you-go systems reduce time spent fetching wood or water and ecommerce opportunities can be compatible with family responsibilities.
  • Building digital capabilities: In Tanzania and Mozambique a partnership between TechnoServe, the ExxonMobil Foundation and Vodacom is trialing a combination of mobile savings account with business skills training for urban businesswomen, using a combination of face to face access and interactive mobile learning platform. The training leads to women saving and taking out microloans through mobile accounts.
  • Data for smart gender budgeting: Austria is a world leader in gender budgeting with requirements to set and report against gender-related outcomes and integrate them into performance contracts, and impact assessments. A web portal publishes sex disaggregated data and budget information and offers a gender and diversity atlas.
  • Digitalization can support the collection of sex-disaggregated data critical for informing gender-sensitive public and private investment strategies. ‘Gender lens investing’ includes investment strategies that aim at advancing women in finance and corporate leadership, supporting products to improve women’s lives, and improving women’s treatment in the workplace. More sex-disaggregated data can further improve the ability to better serve women clients. It also contributes to growing evidence on the positive relationship between gender equality and financial performance.
  • The digitalization of social protection programmes can positively impact the way women participate in economies. It can provide women with independent access to predictable income streams and give female recipients greater control over how the money will be used within households.

It is critical that digital financing solutions are grounded in the reality of the challenges women faced. Lack of affordable devices, data, skills and social norms such as online harassment prevent women accessing the digital world.

The Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) has developed a Policy framework for women’s financial inclusion using digital financial services. It includes guidance on policy, regulation, infrastructure and demand side capabilities and consumer protection. UNSGSA is collaborating with Melinda Gates and the French Minister of Finance to promote a major G7 Partnership for Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa. Efforts to improve sex-disaggregated statistics include work by UNSGSA, UN Women, Data2X, World Bank, AFI, IMF.

 

 

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UN Women:  Leveraging Digital Finance for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (2019)
GSMA: Connected Women: The Mobile Gender Gap Report (2019)