In This Issue
Spotlight on: Orchestrating Data-Driven Ecosystems
This month we’re proud to publish The Gender Data Playbook for Women’s Financial Inclusion, a step-by-step guide for national-level stakeholders on how to boost the systemic collection of high-quality, supply-side, sex-disaggregated data to drive women’s financial inclusion. The playbook codifies the learnings generated from our work with Data2X in supporting the production and use of gender data in Bangladesh, Honduras, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Türkiye over the past three years in our role as technical leads for the Women’s Financial Inclusion Data Partnership (WFID). It draws on diagnostics and stakeholder engagements conducted in each country and is complemented with case examples from Chile, Egypt, Mexico, Rwanda, the United Kingdom and Zambia.
The five-step process given in the Playbook focuses on individual customer data and is applicable to enterprise data, but the latter requires additional effort beyond the scope of this Playbook. And on that, we’re also supporting WE-FI’s efforts to generate data on financing levels to WSMEs, and building on these efforts to potentially develop a Playbook 2.0.
In the meantime, we encourage all our readers—especially our members—to download the Playbook and use it to orchestrate the ecosystem in your country to drive stronger gender data for business decisioning and policy design. To fast-track this work, we’re also running two communities of practice on data this year: first for national aggregators and then for financial services providers. Our members will receive invites to the latter shortly.
Capacity building is core to the Alliance, and today we launched our All-Stars Academy 2023 with the most diverse group of participants we have ever had: 186 students from 64 institutions and 43 countries. This is also the first time we’re offering it in both English and Spanish simultaneously.
We are grateful to our 30 expert teachers from 19 Alliance members: Access Bank Nigeria, BanRegio Mexico, Banco BHD Dominican Republic, Banco Nacional de Costa Rica, BRAC Bank Bangladesh, Bank al Etihad Jordan, Banco Ficohsa Honduras, G&T Guatemala, HBL Pakistan, KCB Kenya, Mahila Money India, Mastercard, NatWest United Kingdom, NedBank South Africa, Banco Pichincha Ecuador, Tyme Bank South Africa and Westpac Australia. A big shout-out to all of you!
We also thank our experts from the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), as well as our incredible Alliance team, who also teaches. And we’re grateful to our financial sponsors—EIB and British Impact Investing (BII)—for supporting the program. (I’ve called out all the institutions that are supporting the All-Stars Academy because it’s an incredible demonstration of how our community works.)
Also this month, we extend a warm welcome to our latest member, Bixie, a fintech that supports and educates women and provides them with the requisite tools to grow their wealth, regardless of their starting point. Please tune in to our video interviews with female founder Rosalia Gitau, who shares her vision for achieving full financial inclusion of women.
We thank all our members for their extraordinary generosity in the many ways they participate in the Alliance.
In community,
