We have seen great improvements in financial inclusion over the past decade, yet there is much more to do. Progress remains uneven, with more than 700 million women worldwide still without access to a transaction account. In developing economies, women experience a financial access gap of 4 percentage points compared with men.
The consequences are immediate and long-term: women who are excluded cannot borrow to invest, save money securely, or access insurance to protect themselves from future shocks.
Making Finance Work for Women
Closing these gaps is critical to unlocking women’s full economic potential and driving job creation and growth. Financial services can empower women, helping them to start and grow businesses, manage household finances, and invest in their futures. Access to credit, savings, insurance, and efficient payments can help women-led businesses expand, create jobs, and grow resilient local economies.
Digital financial services and technology can help bridge the gender gap in account ownership. In turn, access to digital and mobile money accounts can help women control and access financial resources—including remittances, social transfers, and wages—through cards and mobile phones.
Toward Outcomes that Improve Women’s Lives
Opening a financial account is only the first step, however. The financial system must also work for women so that they can not only use their accounts but also leverage them to access other financial services to reap the full benefits of financial inclusion and achieve their goals. This includes expanding livelihoods, building resilience to health, climate, or economic shocks, and managing household expenses like school fees.
Most financial service providers do not see the need to distinguish customers on the basis of gender, believing that gender-neutral strategies serve women and men equally well. Yet, this is not the case, as women’s economic realities are quite different from men’s. For instance, their cash flows tend to be smaller and more volatile. Importantly, women are valuable banking customers: they are often better borrowers, greater savers, and more loyal customers than men, making them a substantial growth opportunity for financial institutions.
Gender-disaggregated data can reveal where women drop off in the customer lifecycle, identify approval gaps, and help design products that better reflect women’s economic realities. It is particularly important to adapt products to the unique needs of young women, women nano-entrepreneurs, women gig workers, and rural women engaged in agriculture.
Financial systems typically reflect the norms of the societies in which they operate – shaping how women are perceived as borrowers, entrepreneurs, and economic actors. These gender norms influence who owns traditional collateral, which sectors are considered viable, how risk and ambition are assessed, and who controls financial decisions within households. This, in turn, influences how financial institutions see women and how women interact with finance. To avoid biases that may result from norms, financial institutions should integrate a gender perspective into their operations and products.
Coalitions and Collective Action
The World Bank Group is taking a multifaceted approach to helping countries unlock women’s economic participation and potential, including ambitious and measurable targets to increase women’s broadband usage, social protections, and capital for women-led businesses.
We are leveraging data, analysis, and technical advice, but also striving to build coalitions and partnerships – bringing together a wide range of stakeholders, including public sector officials, private sector leaders, and civil society.
The barriers that prevent women from deriving the full benefit of finance are structural and require coordinated, sustained action. In Mexico, Morocco, and India, for example, CGAP and the World Bank Group are testing different models of public-private partnerships designed to bring together governments, regulators, and financial institutions around a shared goal of increasing women’s financial inclusion, recognizing that to do so, an ecosystem approach is needed. We are also supporting innovative approaches to increasing financing to women. For example, we helped the Development Bank of Rwanda increase funding of women-led projects from 15 to 30 percent of its portfolio through an innovative sustainability-linked bond issuance. The goal is to help countries build their own blueprint to align policy, innovation, and investment.
By connecting women’s financial inclusion with national economic priorities like job creation, such coalitions can create conditions for systemic, scalable change.
Ensuring Everyone can Benefit from Financial Inclusion
Expanding financial inclusion strengthens development outcomes—supporting women’s economic empowerment, job creation, entrepreneurship, resilience, and access to essential services such as electricity, clean water, and education. When women gain access to financial tools, families, businesses, and economies all benefit.
We have seen positive trends in inclusive finance that offer hope for the future, but this progress must translate into better financial health for millions of women.
As we mark International Women’s Day on March 8, it’s a timely occasion to reaffirm our commitment to fostering a more inclusive economy — one where everyone has the opportunity to access income, opportunity, and dignity.