Tomorrow, people around the world will celebrate International Women’s Day. In honor of the day, and the tremendous impact that financial services can have for women, we’d like to highlight some of the top resources from the past year that focus on financial inclusion of women. Though there are many great resources out there, below are a few that have caught our attention.

1. Findex Notes: Women and Financial Inclusion

Drawing from the Global Findex Database, the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created a briefing on the state of women’s access to and use of financial services globally. It’s a concise snapshot of financial inclusion data on women. It highlights gaps that persist for women, as compared to men, globally and across regions. It looks at variations in account ownership for savings and credit, as well as barriers to usage identified by women. And if you’re looking for more, I suggest exploring the Findex database or the CFI Data Explorer and conducting your own analyses!

2. Promoting Women’s Financial Inclusion: A Toolkit

DFID and GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development prepared a toolkit aimed at policymakers, donors, and NGOs who want to learn how to design and implement programs to enhance the financial inclusion of women. It provides insight into factors that contribute to financial exclusion of women and offers recommendations to address access barriers. In addition, the toolkit provides methods for client segmentation as well as several illustrative case studies. Rather than suggesting focusing on women exclusively, the toolkit also recommends understanding the distinct needs of men.

3. Ready for Growth: Solutions to Increase Access to Finance for Women-Owned Businesses in the Middle East and North Africa

Vital Voices, MENA Businesswomen’s Network, and the IFC partnered on a report that explores solutions to increase access to finance for women in the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing from an in-depth survey of over 430 women from eight countries in MENA, the report reveals that many women face barriers in accessing finance (41 percent of those surveyed), citing high interest rates (67 percent) and lack of collateral (36 percent) as the main obstacles. In addition, many of the surveyed women expressed high demand for greater access to information and training to grow their businesses. With this expansion, access to financial services will be vital. Along with insightful data, the report includes recommendations on improving access to finance, developing tailored products, and overcoming barriers that women face.

4. Women and Financial Literacy: OECD/INFE Evidence, Survey and Policy Responses

In a report released mid last year, the OECD International Network on Financial Education (INFE) discusses data that illustrates gender differences in financial literacy levels. The findings indicate that in many countries women are less financially literate as well as less confident in their abilities than men. Additionally, the report explains the consequences of low financial literacy levels and points to potential explanations for why gender differences may exist, such as the effects of differing test formats or the influence of social networks. In response to the prevailing gap, the report considers ways to address barriers that women may face, drawing from existing policies and initiatives targeted at the needs of women and girls.

5. Unlocking the Potential: Women and Mobile Financial Services in Emerging Markets

Visa, GSMA’s mWomen, and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) have prepared a report that looks at how best to design mobile financial services, based upon data collected by BFA in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and Tanzania. The report illustrates preferences and barriers to access, gleaned through interviews with women at the base of the pyramid. To share a few insights, 63 percent of women in Tanzania perceived savings groups as reliable and secure, while 86 percent of women in the country who use formal institutions for savings find them to be reliable and secure. For many of the services that women often use, mobile financial services can increase security and simplify processes. This is true for payments women typically make (utilities, school expenses), money transfers and remittances, and government-to-person-payments.

BONUS! We tried to stay with 5, but couldn’t resist highlighting another resource that we covered in an earlier post by Jaclyn Berfond.

Gender Performance Indicators: How Well Are We Serving Women?

Have you been searching for a vetted framework for tracking and measuring institutional gender performance? Building on the work of the social performance community, Women’s World Banking (WWB) created an analytic framework of gender performance indicators, organized around three themes: Client-Centric Focus, Institutional Focus, and Financial and Social Outcomes. To support the development of these indicators, WWB piloted them with three microfinance institutions: Ujjivan Financial Services in India; Finance Trust in Uganda; and Fundación Delamujer in Colombia. Each indicator is ranked based upon its expected degree of complexity to implement, identifies responsible actors, and has corresponding data from the pilot organizations. Providers, take note. This is the best resource out there for measuring gender performance. And don’t forget to disaggregate any collected data!

What were your favorite resources of 2013, centered on financial inclusion of women?

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There’s a lot of data out there. And some of us are brave enough to use it (including you, my friend).

Recently we released an interactive Data Explorer tool and individual Country Profiles, allowing users to visually explore financial inclusion data in comparison with other development indicators in one central location. You can see our analysis of some of the data, but more importantly, we would like to invite you to explore the data for yourself.

For those interested in financial inclusion figures in specific countries, regions, or income groups of interest, visit Country Profiles. There we display data from the Global Findex along with demographic data relevant to understanding financial inclusion across the lifecycle. As we continue our own analysis of global trends, we will add figures on income, urbanization, technology, and more for each country.

Click on the financial inclusion bars to see a breakdown of the data by client segment, and use the tool to understand why or how people use financial services in particular countries. At the bottom of the page, you can interact with the demographic data by scrolling through the years to see past and projected population trends from 1950 to 2100. (This is very cool.)

For those who want a data adventure, driven by an interest in specific issues or factors, we suggest you go to Data Explorer. Data are now available from the UN on demography, the Findex on financial inclusion, as well as the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, with more to be added in the coming months.

Data Explorer is built on Google’s platform, and lets users choose the type of graph they want to look at, add up to four variables, plot the data on a map, and more. For datasets that include more than one year, you can “play” a video of the variable changing over time (look for the triangle in the bottom left hand corner). If you have a hypothesis you want to investigate, this is the place to go.

For example, I’ve been wondering for some time now if mobile phone penetration translates into the use of mobile phones for banking. I plotted, therefore, mobile phone subscriptions against the percent of people that use mobile phones to receive money. Each dot represents a country, and I colored the countries by their income group (as determined by the World Bank). I found something quite surprising:

There really doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship in 2011 between mobile phone subscriptions and the percent of people who use a mobile phone to receive money. This raises the question of what prompts mobile phone banking to take root in a financial culture.

Over the coming months, we’ll be posting observations and analyses that emerge from the use of these tools. If you find something that you want to share, feel free to contact us. We’re looking forward to hearing stories from the data adventures our users take.

For more information on Financial Inclusion 2020, sign up for campaign updates.

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Happy International Women’s Day! I am pretty excited today because I get to wear both my gender and financial inclusion lenses. Year-in, year-out, on International Women’s Day I read posts probing universal progress in women’s political participation, engagement in the work place, and advancement in the boardroom, to mention but a few. Now, I wish to examine the state of women’s access to financial services globally.

Thankfully, the Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign recently launched the interactive Mapping the Invisible Market Data Explorer, so it is easy to put graphs together to examine women’s participation. My work is already half done! I won’t claim to be exhaustive in this post. What I offer here are snippets of cross-regional analyses on women’s access to savings, accounts, modes of payment, and other forms of financial activity.

Let’s start!

Not surprisingly, high-income countries have the greatest percentage of women having an account at a formal financial institution, standing at 87.4 percent. The Asia-Pacific region comes in second at 52.1 percent. The bottom two positions are occupied by sub-Saharan Africa and Middle East/North Africa (MENA) at 21.5 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively.

Coming from Ghana, where our economy is bolstered by industrious female traders (and I will take this opportunity to salute them for all their hard work), my next instinct is to check how many women worldwide use accounts for business purposes. To describe my reaction to these findings as shocked is an understatement. High-income countries lead again, at 22.1 percent, which to me is quite low. The second position is taken by sub-Saharan Africa, which makes me happy, but the percentage is low enough to almost make me cry – 4 percent. I immediately recall stories I have heard of market women who have lost everything – fiscal and goods – because they kept their cash in a fire-prone market stall instead of putting it in the bank.

Which brings me to the topic of savings. If you ever took a basic economics class you learned about savings and the wonderful formula showing how savings feeds into investment which feeds into… you get the idea. So, how well are women being equipped to weather future storms and in turn grow the GDP of their nations?

If we look at the statistics on women who saved at a financial institution in the past year, the rankings aren’t much different from those on having accounts at formal financial institutions. High-income countries rank first with 42.9 percent, followed by East Asia & Pacific at 28.5 percent; Eastern Europe & Central Asia and MENA come in last at 6.9 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively.

But there is an interesting twist! Look at the numbers on women who saved using a savings club shown in the graph below. Sub-Saharan Africa dwarfs the other regions at 20 percent, with the nearest group being high-income countries at 5.3 percent. However, the high frequency of savings using a method that is traditional in many African societies shows how certain adaptations in financial inclusion can appeal to women who may not want to put their money in a formal account. Recently I’ve been wondering whether mobile savings could accommodate savings groups, and even extend their reach beyond physical proximity, for example, involving people working in the same trade in different cities.

This leads me to my favorite topic: mobile financial services. Being a techy, I love anything related to mobile phones and the amazing inroads being made in promoting financial inclusion using basic handsets and, increasingly, smartphones.

Predictably, the largest percentages of women who use mobile financial services are in emerging economies, most usually for receiving money and paying bills. According to the latest GSMA mWomen report on women and financial services in emerging markets, women are usually the family members who conduct financial transactions, including paying bills, sending and receiving remittances, and handling government-to-person payments (G2P). As Cherie Blair, the founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, said in an interview with Visa’s Voices of Inclusion, “The mobile phone is not the panacea, but, it is the real entry into a way of giving women financial inclusion.”

In the push for cashless, lighter, more efficient economies, the ideal would be for traditional electronic payments to become the norm. However, the uptake of these has been slow, as the graph below shows.

I think I’ve covered enough ground for now. What are your thoughts? I encourage you to try out our Data Explorer, and to share your thoughts on where women are now in regards to financial services access.

Image credit: The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF)

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