> Posted by Kelsey Truman, HBS-Accion Program Coordinator, CFI
Domestic abuse and violence against women (VAW) are pervasive and shocking. According to the World Bank, 38 percent of murders of women globally are committed through intimate partner violence. Globally, one-third of all women have experienced domestic or intimate partner violence. The World Health Organization even went so far as to call VAW a “global health problem of epidemic proportions.” Could financial services possibly play a role in improving this situation?
One of the largest hurdles in combating VAW around the world is women’s inability or unwillingness to seek help when they find themselves in abusive situations. In conjunction with fear, one important reason many women don’t seek help rests on their degree of financial dependency. That is, they don’t have enough money or economic resources necessary to establish themselves independently, much less pay for legal fees and so forth. Furthermore, women’s vulnerability to violence has been shown to increase with their relative level of poverty. If women are given options to easily and discreetly pursue financial options and open bank accounts independently of their husbands and other male family members, it could very well save their lives one day.
One report from the World Bank found that women in developing countries like Pakistan faced multiple obstacles accessing basic financial services without at least two male guarantors. The same report goes on to find that in countries with higher VAW (like Pakistan) women are less likely to have a bank account, formal savings, or formal credit – which may further entrench them into a cycle of abuse. Therefore, financial service providers, according to Bobbi Gray at Grameen Foundation, have a responsibility to pursue robust financial inclusion pilots “to provide the financial services industry with a set of standardized, comparable, relevant, and reliable health indicators that they can add to the existing poverty measurements they are using to assess the impacts of their services for clients,” including in terms of VAW.
Policy and programs that pursue financial access and empowerment can help women create a tailored approach to address their particular situations. Financial inclusion initiatives, especially mobile and digital banking, can facilitate women’s access to financial services in a safe way, promoting independence. Economic empowerment through money management tools like a bank account can be a quiet VAW intervention and, if done correctly, can help afford distance between women and their abusers. MFIs and governments need to remove barriers to account accessibility to allow women to assert their financial independence.
Of course, increasing women’s access to financial services is not only the right thing to do, it is also a savvy business strategy. Private enterprises like telecoms companies and MFIs benefit from expanding their client base by making mobile banking solutions available to women. And there are plenty of markets with high mobile penetration rates and proliferating mobile money services where women could readily benefit – from Mongolia, to Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Kenya, and numerous places in between.
Bank accounts are not a silver bullet in combating VAW or women’s economic empowerment, but they help build a foundation that can give a woman more control over her own finances. Such control can be a necessary first step she takes to remove herself from abuse. And if a bank account leads to a savings account, and a line of credit, this progression adds safeguard options for emergency funds required to leave an abusive situation. Bank accounts could be the tipping point in a woman’s ability to remove herself and her family from unhealthy and possibly dangerous circumstances.
Have you read?
Domestic Violence and Microfinance: What Is Our Role as Financial Service Providers?
Savings Groups, Mobile Phones, and a New Solution for Rural Women
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April 4, 2017 at 6:02 am
Mildred Wengonzi
This is very interesting, In Uganda, Bank accounts has increased savings among women because they save through saving groups and the money is deposited to the bank and this helps the women by being relieved from stress and abuse due to the husband pressure in need of money especially if the woman/ spouse is the saving group treasurer in an informal way of keeping the money group/ individual savings with in the house. Therefore Bank accounts save women’s lives.
April 5, 2017 at 10:16 am
Bobbi Gray
Kelsey, this is a great piece. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to draw people’s attention to some research done by Abu Zafar M. Shahriar. He conducted an RCT laboratory experiment in Bangladesh to look at the connection between intimate partner violence and repayment of microcredit (see here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2016.07.012; this is a gated paper so if you need access to it, I can assist). His research found that: “exposure to spousal violence reduces the effectiveness of dynamic repayment incentives—a widely used borrower-disciplining device in microcredit. When loans are offered with dynamic incentives, battered women are more likely to strategically default on both individual and joint liability loans relative to those who did not experience spousal violence in the recent past.” I realize this is on microcredit and not related to your post about access to savings accounts, but I thought these findings present an interesting conundrum for FSPs: microcredit can potentially help a battered woman invest in income-generation that provides her autonomy and helps her remove herself from a bad situation, but she’s also likely to be a very risky client.
There is some interesting work going on through the IDB regarding domestic violence. Finca Peru is repeating a version of the IMAGE study that was done with SEF in South Africa (see here: http://www.iadb.org/en/topics/gender-indigenous-peoples-and-african-descendants/vaw-brochure,8014.html). I’m hopeful we’ll have more research/experience to draw on regarding Finca’s experience soon. But it would be great to see more examples or more experiences shared regarding direct efforts to address domestic violence within microfinance. I know the more research we do where we ask whether the woman felt fear of her spouse in the last 12 months is helping us really understand how much this dynamic is playing into the lives of the people we’re serving. I don’t have any great answers yet but am happy that you’re helping continue this conversation.
April 5, 2017 at 10:48 am
Bobbi Gray
One last thought: this also reminds me of the article that came out at the end of last year from the NYTimes regarding training hairdressers to detect domestic violence (see here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/us/hairdressers-domestic-abuse-sexual-assault-illinois.html?_r=0). There could also be potential for the financial sector actors that work a lot with women (those that have stronger relationships such as those who are in village banks or savings groups) to be trained to detect domestic violence and simply help link women to services that can help them. I know there are several MFIs in Latin America, like Finca Peru above, Manuela Ramos in Peru, CRECER in Bolivia that have designed their own domestic violence curriculum or designed programs. It might be great to find a way to have them share any insights they have regarding this topic. I’m sure there are more across the globe that could share as well if we knew who they were.