On Our Radar: September 2022

Building on a previous post arguing why agent gender matters for business performance, this piece considers what agent gender means for women customers. Findings from Kore Global reveal that agent gender matters greatly in contexts where gender norms restrict women’s interactions and opportunities, when women are given the choice, and for hard-to-reach customers, who are otherwise left unserved. 

Savings at the Frontier (SatF) was set up as an experimental program with the objective of finding sustainable business models in partnership with financial services providers to serve informal savings mechanisms and their users with innovative financial services. This note presents the innovation drivers and competencies that project teams identified as key to developing innovative financial services that meet customer needs.

A new op-ed by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development discusses the recent rise of Facebook commerce, or F-commerce, and subsequent efforts by the Government of Bangladesh to regulate (and tax) the industry — a move this article argues will disproportionately disrupt female entrepreneurs. 

This Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs blog takes a historical look at the impact women’s economic empowerment (WEE) has had on Cambodia, showing that WEE is about much more than just funding. Fostering WEE often leads to greater impact than may initially meet the eye – building a sense of independence, fostering women in leadership positions and creating transformative generational change as mothers leave behind an empowered legacy to their own daughters.