FinEquity member and Opportunity International's Senior Programme Manager, Lydia Baffour Awuah, sat down with us to tell us about her work and how her organization is building financial resilience among rural women in Malawi by digitalizing savings groups.

An updated take on "What We're Reading". The FinEquity team brings you a curated list of women's financial inclusion and economic empowerment content we've been consuming recently, from podcasts, new initiatives, and articles to videos and social posts.

New research from the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, in partnership with Intuit, highlights the key experiences, challenges and opportunities from 1,156 women entrepreneurs in low and middle income countries with particular focus on digital, AI, networks, online gender-based violence, gender discrimination and accessing finance. The Foundation’s CEO, Dhivya O’Connor, shares what needs to be done so that women can overcome challenges and access opportunities.

FinEquityALC's Regional Lead, Mariana Martinez shares her main takeaways from the #FinEquityALC2024 annual convening, on key topics including gender-focused investment, intentional gender regulations and the power of gender-disaggregated data to accelerate women's financial inclusion.

FinEquity member and Desjardins International Development (DID)'s, Luisa Fernanda Villamil, sat down with us to tell us about her work and how DID is building financial resilience among women cocoa farmers in rural Colombia.

FinEquity member and We-Fi Secretariat's Operations Officer, Farid Tadros, sat down with us to share about his work and We-Fi’s work on climate and how they are empowering women entrepreneurs to tackle climate challenges.

An updated take on "What We're Reading". The FinEquity team brings you a curated list of women's financial inclusion and economic empowerment content we've been consuming recently, from podcasts, new initiatives, and articles to videos and social posts.

Since 2021, GRID Impact has been working with the Inclusive Financial Systems team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to examine barriers inhibiting women’s access to and usage of financial services. In this blog, Caroline Morrow discusses the importance of looking at barriers for specific women in specific contexts, shares insights into Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and provides reflections from the FinEquity Africa Annual Convening on the way forward. 

Intentionally embedding a gender lens in private investments can help grow women-led MSMEs. As part of the #FinEquity2024 Annual Meeting blog series, we share insights on how integrating a gender lens can yield both financial returns and social progress—with evidence of success from Women’s World Banking Asset Management and Deetken Impact’s Ilu Empowerment Fund. 

To help measure the impact of digitalization programs, Decodis, in partnership with Fundación Capital and Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, created the Digital Stickiness Index (DSI): a holistic measure that encompasses the different aspects that define the digitalization journey of small businesses. This blog explains how the index works, how it acts as a measure of impact for women-led small businesses and how it can also provide direction to investors, practitioners, and donors seeking to boost women-led small businesses.