Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Context of Financial Inclusion

Financial inclusion stakeholders continue to face important challenges to define and measure women’s economic empowerment (WEE). Developing and using a common approach to measuring WEE is critical for understanding the impacts of various financial inclusion programs and initiatives across geographies and populations. Doing so will help us to better understand how these impacts are being achieved, and what works and what doesn’t in promoting WEE in the context of financial inclusion efforts.

In this event co-hosted by CGD, Data2X, and FinEquity, we launched an initiative to identify and test a core set of WEE indicators for financial inclusion. To kick it off this session explored how best to measure women’s economic empowerment in the context of financial inclusion projects, initiatives, and investments. Researchers, practitioners, and investors shared their ongoing efforts to encourage financial institutions to collect and utilize gender data, as well as how project teams are integrating WEE measures into their monitoring and evaluation frameworks.