About Access to Finance Rwanda
Access to Finance Rwanda (AFR) is a Rwandan not for profit company established in 2010 to promote financial inclusion and financial sector development. AFR is currently funded by Sweden, Jersey Overseas Aid, and the MasterCard Foundation. Access to Finance Rwanda is part of the broader Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) network in Africa that seeks to create a transformative impact on the ending of poverty by supporting efforts to improve financial inclusion and financial sector development through helping policy makers, regulators, financial service providers and markets drive a more inclusive and sustainable economic growth. AFR supports the removal of systemic barriers that hinder access to and use of financial services by low-income people, particularly the rural poor, women, youth and MSMEs. AFR supports the development and provision of financial services including savings, credit, insurance, investment, payments, and remittances. AFR is guided by the Market System Development (MSD) approach recognising that efforts to increase financial inclusion and financial sector development must be market-led, profitable and sustainable.
About the Program
(Mainstreaming Gender for Women Financial Inclusion) AFR mainstreams the inclusion of women in all its interventions and perceives women’s economic empowerment as a continuum along the pathway that has three levels of women’s economic empowerment namely, access, agency, and achievement. Since its inception, AFR has supported 1,549,954 women to use improved high-quality financial services.
AFR also designs and implements gender-intentional projects. Currently, we are implementing a project named “Unlocking Livelihoods through Financing Women-owned MSEs (Wisigara Mugore)” to support women’s economic empowerment by expanding the usage of high-value financial services in the context of women’s livelihoods. It is anchored on strengthening the capacity of Financial Service Providers (FSPs) in designing and deploying women-centric financial services that substantially improve their lives and livelihoods and enhance entrepreneurial skills among women entrepreneurs.