Emerging Trends in National Financial Inclusion Strategies that Support Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurs can be a powerful force for good. They're building small businesses, generating income, and creating jobs — all while building resilience and supporting progress on wider global goals. 

But women entrepreneurs continue to face persistent gender-based barriers that impede their success – such as unequal access to financial accounts, constrained credit, and normative roles that keep women in the role of primary caregivers. Improved financial inclusion can help reduce some of these barriers.  

This Brief presents data collected by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project on how National Financial Inclusion Strategies can spur policy and regulatory reforms in support of women’s entrepreneurship. 

An increasing number of National Financial Inclusion Strategies are now highlighting the need to promote women’s financial inclusion. However, this new analysis from WBL and CGAP finds that they could do more to promote access to credit for women entrepreneurs, and to enhance the national-level collection and analysis of sex-disaggregated financial data. 

This Brief is a part of a research effort on financial inclusion by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) team. Support for this research is provided by CGAP.