The Next Chapter for Women’s Financial Inclusion: Moving Toward a Visible Step-Change

Executive Summary

While access to financial services has served as a foundational step toward financial inclusion for women, progress is far from uniform for two key reasons. First, progress around access remains uneven and incomplete, with stark regional variations and nearly 800 million women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) still unbanked. Second, the simple opening of a bank account has not automatically led to women’s deeper engagement, trust, and confidence in the financial system. These gaps have thereby created an uneven landscape of success for women’s financial inclusion (WFI). Persistent barriers—such as entrenched gender norms, lack of gender-disaggregated data and insights, lack of customized financial solutions for different segments of women, and fragmented, disconnected sectoral efforts—continue to impede cohesive progress in the market and prevent the impactful step change needed to advance WFI.  

Now is the time to unite around bold, collaborative financial solutions that meet women where they are—solutions designed around their realities, livelihoods, and financial journeys. At the current pace of change, it will take over a century to close the gender gap in access to financial services.  We cannot afford to wait. Looking ahead, the scale of the solution must match the scale of the challenge, underscoring the urgent need for larger, more coordinated measures. The time is right for a new approach that brings together individual, often disparate public and private sector efforts, ensuring combined efforts lead to more impactful solutions and generate results greater than the sum of their parts. 

CGAP’s gender conceptual framework offers a new vision for the next chapter of WFI, an intentional whole-of-market response that is rooted in all actors across the financial ecosystem serving women more—and better. This response combines the granular insights amassed on WFI with bold, systems-level interventions at the country level that move the financial ecosystem. It will require fundamental transformations across the market to more intentionally see women and serve them with greater precision and relevance: 

• SHIFT: Shifting how market actors understand, design, and deliver products and programs in government, private sector, and development spaces by moving away from gender-neutral strategies to interventions tailored to different segments of women
• EXPAND: Expanding efforts by scaling and replicating successful pilots and programs through more private innovation and public enabling measures
• ELEVATE: Elevating solutions to the highest levels across policy, regulatory, commercial, and social dimensions in the market

Achieving a Shift, Expand, and Elevate (SEE) vision requires a stronger commitment, ranging from the public and private sectors to donors and funders alike, to act and more concertedly serve women through gender-intentional business models, policies, and interventions. The whole-of-market response is anchored in intentional, concerted action at the highest level across public and private actors, around five WFI levers to drive meaningful impact: 

1. Establishing a robust gender-disaggregated data infrastructure 
2. Adopting enabling policies, regulations, and guidelines 
3. Driving an inclusive investment environment 
4. Addressing gender norms nationally 
5. Developing common goals between the public and private sectors  

Finally, while the future of WFI hinges on such an approach from the highest authorities, individual market actions matter to deliver solutions to excluded women. Thus, the success of a whole-of-market response hinges on establishing a seamless feedback loop that links the five WFI levers at the national level with ongoing market actions within institutions and sectors. By coordinating insights and sharing lessons learned across different initiatives, successful pilots and innovations can be scaled and replicated at the national level. This mechanism will ensure continuous improvement and collaboration across sectors and actors, amplifying the impact of WFI efforts. 

To make this vision a reality, we must unite across public, private, and development sectors, aligning resources and influence to build a synchronized, lasting vision that accelerates WFI in a meaningful and lasting way. The time to act is now.