Letter from Inez: January 2025

4 Minutes Read

Spotlight On: 2025—Focus on Scale

The New Year has brought with it fresh impetus – and a packed agenda – which will see the Alliance and its members build even further on the high bar set during 2024!

It’s particularly gratifying to know that we enter the year with a larger and growing membership base, with banking groups such as Standard Bank and ProCredit having joined us with the intent of rolling out Women’s Markets across multiple countries. Likewise, new members with national reach such as TD Bank Canada, FNB South Africa and Global Bank Panama add to an impressive list of members, all with a strong focus on changing the game in their markets.

First Alliance Summit on African Soil

Planning is well underway for our Annual Summit, set to take place on May 28-29 in Kigali, Rwanda, and hosted by Alliance member Access to Finance Rwanda and National Bank Rwanda.

Holding our flagship event in Kigali enables us to tap into the latest innovations on a continent that pioneered mobile banking services in the early 2000s, enabling millions of women worldwide to access financial services. This year’s Summit is themed ‘Accelerating Enabling Entrepreneurial Ecosystems’ and will start with the launch of Rwanda’s WE Finance Code. We will then go deep into the practicalities of funding women business owners at different stages of their entrepreneurial journey – from what it takes to build networks of angel investors to back start-ups; to practical strategies to enable more debt finance from banks and neobanks. We’ll explore the latest mobile phone based financial and business capability building apps as well as mapping out the blueprint for a female friendly entrepreneurial ecosystem. As usual, the event will be rich in practical insight from leading practitioners and policy makers and should not be missed. (Please mark your calendars and register today!)

Codifying the know-how

As our members continue to innovate and lead in their markets, we are committed to harvesting this know-how to share with others. In 2025, this includes offering a series of Case Studies, InBriefs and tools, the first of which is published today: an InBrief on building national gender data dashboards. This resource showcases the national dashboards which have been built in Bangladesh and Nigeria to provide a snapshot of women’s financial inclusion in those countries, sliced and diced by segment, geography, product and channel, using real-time data gathered by the Central Banks of Bangladesh and Nigeria. Conceived and implemented with our partner ConsumerCentriX, we believe these dashboards are fundamental to underpinning nation-wide actions in support of Women’s Markets, and are working to roll-out similar dashboards in Pakistan and Uganda in 2025. Our ambition is to replicate them widely around the world.

Sharing the learning

We have a jam-packed 2025 peer learning and training calendar, through which our members generously volunteer their insights gained throughout their years of experience in Women’s Markets, acting as mentors and teachers in many of our peer learning activities. Exclusive to our members, our Ask The Expert Series will focus on scaling programs by sharing strategies for new segments of Women’s Markets; our EVP Taskforce will focus on deepening female representation in the senior ranks and we are very pleased to offer our first in-person All Stars Academy since before the pandemic. You will find a preview of all activities here. Please mark your calendars.

Scaling the WE Finance Code

As part of our industry building work, we will continue to support WE Finance Code implementing countries with a robust learning and knowledge sharing agenda in partnership with We-Fi (the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, part of the World Bank). This includes coordinating the WE Finance Code Community of Champions for the main organizations implementing the Code in the 30+ countries in 2025. These champions will have a robust learning agenda that includes four online webinars and one in-person full day workshop on May 30, the day after the Annual Summit in Kigali, during which we will hear key learnings from Champions from implementing countries. If you are a Code Anchor, please register here, if you haven’t already done so.Support for Code countries also includes online training for Code signatories in the form of the Primer on the Business and Strategic Case for Serving WMSMEs and in the WMSME Gender Data Learning Series, a must for data analysts and users at the FSP and national data aggregator levels.

The Alliance will also be supporting Code implementation through in-country capacity building in the Dominican Republic, across four Central Asian Republics, and Mongolia and Pakistan.

Lessons from country implementations will be codified into Case Studies and InBriefs to support replication as we build the global WE Finance Code movement.

We acknowledge that none of the Alliance’s work would be possible without the extraordinary generosity of our members and strategic partners. Together, we look forward to reaching new heights in 2025.

In community,

Inez Murray Newsletter Signature