Our Female Economy Analytics program, available to our members, is the only industry-wide repository of data on the female economy, offering consistent metrics and definitions, and helping members make the business case for serving women. The Financial Alliance for Women Female Economy Analytics program:
In 2014 the Financial Alliance for Women partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank and Data 2x to explore the collection and use of sex-disaggregated data across the financial sector. The partnership has since expanded to include IDB Invest, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank Group (WBG), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF, and the European Bank for Reconstrucion and Development (EBRD). Through the Women’s Financial Inclusion Data (WFID) partnership, we have developed a multi-stakeholder understanding of the gaps, challenges and opportunities around sex-disaggregated data, as well as an assessment of the national and international-level challenges and potential solutions in collecting sex-disaggregated data. The partnership is contributing to increasing the capture, analysis, and reporting of sex-disaggregated banking data around the world, which will allow for deeper understanding of the dimensions of closing the financial services gap to women and further development of the women’s banking market.
WFID’s Global Gender Data Strategy identified the relative lack of use cases and the need to build national-level data ecosystems and increase capacity to implement these efforts as a key priority to generate necessary and actionable data to close the women’s financial inclusion gap.
With support from the Gates Foundation, WFID will address the lack of national sex-disaggregated supply-side data collection and use in several countries through building national-level capabilities on gender data and encouraging mainstreaming of technical assistance providers on gender data.
WFID’s focus countries for this work include Nigeria, Bangladesh, Honduras (EN, ES), Kenya, Pakistan and Turkey.
The long-term objective of this work is to increase women’s use of financial services by increasing policymakers’ and providers’ access to timely, precise, sex-disaggregated supply side data. This will help test the WFID theory of change, which posits that market development for women’s financial inclusion will be driven by improved gender data within countries—as this improved data will allow key national stakeholders to see gender gaps and act upon them.
Check out our findings and recommendations below and keep watching this space for new publications on our data work.