FinEquity Knowledge Guide: Gender Data and Analysis

This brief makes the case for how sex-disaggregated data can support women’s financial inclusion, looking at use cases in policy and regulation, program and product design, and monitoring, and evaluation. The Annex provides a list of publicly available financial inclusion gender data sources with information on coverage, level of disaggregation, and frequency of data collection. This brief is for decision-makers, program staff, and performance monitoring and evaluation practitioners working for all types of institutions that support financial inclusion.

This glossary shares definitions of the most common financial inclusion indicators used by members of the Women’s Financial Inclusion Data (WFID) Partnership. It is the result of a systematic review of over 350 financial inclusion indicators in use across programs, surveys, datasets, and publications. The glossary advances data harmonization by accelerating an understanding of data sets and serves as a first step to increasing data compatibility.

This guidance note provides guidance to regulated financial institutions - licensed and regulated by the central bank or by any other financial regulatory and supervisory institution – related to the different elements needed to complete periodic financial data reporting returns or reporting templates using a sex-disaggregated data approach.

This brief defines what is classified as a women's account or women-owned business, which is critical for tracking such data accurately and consistently.  It also outlines the practical decisions that financial institutions need to make when setting Women's Markets definitions, the first step in generating high-quality gender data and tailoring propositions for women customers.

While no universal set of proven good practices for collecting and using supply-side gender-disaggregated data (S-GDD) in the financial sector has been established, this paper explores how S-GDD has been collected and used, mainly by financial sector authorities but also by providers, and the challenges and opportunities associated with this work. It highlights lessons to date, identifies existing gaps, and proposes next steps for future work to unlock S-GDD’s potential to support women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment. 

This set of six country diagnostics offer detailed assessments of the availability and use of gender data for achieving women’s financial inclusion, including the opportunities to intervene, close data gaps, and expand access to financial services. The accompanying synthesis brief summarizes the main findings and lessons from the diagnostics. These reports can serve as a resource for governments, financial services providers, and others interested in improving their own gender data and financial services ecosystems.    

This webinar series features Financial Service Providers (FSP) that are using innovative ways to learn and respond to women's differentiated needs and preferences as a key to growing their market share and achieving business goals. FSPs share insights about their successes, failures, and lessons learned on how they were able to benefit from adopting a segmentation approach that involved better understanding the specific needs of different groups of women and designing products and services to better meet their needs, which ultimately translated into increased profitability and impact.

This brief is a practical guide to support financial services providers interested in beginning to sex-disaggregating data or those looking for ways to improve their gender data practices, based on the experience of Financial Alliance for Women members. It shares best practices and relevant examples within a 5-step process: Needs Assessment and Definitions Setting, Data Planning, Systems and Process Integration, Data Capture, and Data Analysis and Use.

This toolkit presents the considerable business opportunity gender Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) present to Financial Service Providers (FSPs) in their pursuit of client centricity that enables them to tap into untapped market opportunities and to better understand and serve different segments of women and men.  The toolkit is available in English and Arabic.

This background paper documents the FinEquity community’s journey to create a common set of indicators to measure Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) measurement through an increase in financial inclusion. Building on Theory of Change and a set of proposed indicators outlined in the paper, CGAP and FinEquity facilitated a Collaborative Learning program to test and refine the measurement framework. This learning initiative resulted in a refined set of indicators. For more about this testing process listen to webinar recording [June 20,2024]

This tool can be used by countries to understand the current maturity level of their gender data system, diagnose strengths and weaknesses, and identify priority areas for improvement. The BRIDGE tool is intended to be used by gender data focal points in national statistical offices (NSOs) of low- and middle- income countries and by their partners within national statistical systems (NSSs) to determine and communicate their gender data priorities to policy makers and donors.

This guide for development practitioners and policymakers defines the core concepts of the three A’s (Access, Agency, and Achievements), provides a framework for quantifying WEE in financial inclusion and five-step methodology to measure WEE. The methodology explains how to map the empowerment pathway for a financial inclusion initiative, develop WEE indicators, develop a WEE measurement plan, collect WEE data, and analyze and use WEE data. 

This course, consisting of 11 modules, guides trainers on how to conduct gender statistics training. The materials in each module (syllabus, PPT, exercises, tests, resources) can also be used by individual learners interested in gender data and how to use it. Depending on the subject matter, modules target experts, non-experts, or both. Modules build on each other but can also be used stand-alone. Each module lists the target audience, and how to use the information, and recommends prerequisite modules or knowledge needed for the module. 

Who is this course for and how to use it: 

• Statisticians to understand what gender statistics are and how these can be integrated across different areas of statistics
• Policymakers and decision-makers to enhance their use of gender data for evidence-based decision-making.
• Academicians to inform their research through the use of gender data.
• Civil Society organizations to enhance their use of gender data for advocacy or communication purposes.

Media personnel to integrate gender data into their media products.

This is a step-by-step guide for financial ecosystem stakeholders on how to boost the systematic collection of high-quality, supply-side, sex-disaggregated financial data to drive women’s financial inclusion. Each step of the playbook includes key questions to consider, research insights captured from case studies and lessons from the pilot testing and other country experiences. It has downloadable tools, resources, and country case studies and is also available in Spanish.