FinEquity's Top Reads of 2021

This guide is aimed at helping funders and market facilitators design interventions that address the gender gap and increase women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment by taking gender norms into account. 

Produced by Banyan Global through the Women’s Economic Empowerment and Equality Technical Assistance (WE3 TA) task order, this evidence review highlights the long-standing and structural barriers contributing to gender inequality, preventing women from full economic participation and consequently causing and perpetuating poverty. 

This paper brings together the evidence of what is known on norms and financial inclusion and uses cases to demonstrate aspects of and approaches to addressing discriminatory norms throughout the financial system. It also highlights many remaining areas for further inquiry on norms and financial services that would enable improved women’s economic empowerment. 

This report considers how women’s mobile access and use are changing across low-to-midde income counties (LMICs), and how efforts to reach women with this technology should continue to evolve. 

This new policy response tracker and updated dashboard allows financial regulators and policymakers to track national gender policy responses to COVID-19 implemented in AFI member jurisdictions. 

This study examines the role that financial services regulators can play in efforts to address financial inclusion of women: how they are using, or could use, sex-disaggregated data (SDD) to enhance women’s access to and use of financial products and services of the right quality that meet their needs; and how new technologies could help. 

This brief is a FinEquity community effort meant to help the financial inclusion community understand digital financial literacy and better address this component of the digital financial services gender gap. 

This guidance document brings together best practices and lessons learned to aid providers and international organizations that are working to improve women’s financial capabilities, skills, and inclusion. It demonstrates how practitioners can develop a better understanding of women – in particular, the gendered norms that guide their lives as well as the challenges that digital technology poses for women. 

This report focuses on building the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for customers to engage with digital financial services and offers practical tools to develop DFC initiatives that promote women’s active engagement in digital financial services and their economic empowerment. 

Given the digitalization drives in most sectors, this case study explores whether the use of digital financial services (DFS) in sectors other than financial services can be used to accelerate women’s financial inclusion and reduce gender inequality. 

Leveraging the global work of institutions, donors, and individuals striving to advance women’s financial inclusion, this toolkit by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) provides an overview of women’s financial inclusion and covers the topics of project scoping, design, and implementation as well as impact measurement. 

This playbook by the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) is a practical how-to guide on leveraging the market system development approach to decrease the digital and financial divide for women and girls, use technology to improve women’s economic opportunities and help transform women into builders of emerging digital economies. 

This World Bank toolkit provides practical guidance to analyze, design, and measure technology-enabled solutions to advance women’s entrepreneurship. Its detailed instructions and resources are intended to help implementers to use thorough diagnostic processes to unearth key constraints to female entrepreneurship, including barriers to technology access and use. 

IDEO’s Gender in Design toolkit equips designers with foundational knowledge and some simple tools that can help them create more impactful solutions for women, men, boys and girls that transform gender and other social inequalities.