Spotlight on: Summit Success
A record crowd attended the brilliant 2025 Annual Summit hosted by the National Bank of Rwanda and Access to Finance Rwanda in Kigali last month.
Alliance members and soon-to-be members, central banks, multilateral development banks, enterprise support organizations, impact investors and female founders gathered to unpack what is needed to accelerate entrepreneurial ecosystems and make access to finance the norm for women entrepreneurs, especially in Africa.
The Summit, our first on African soil, focused on what is working and what needs to be done to unlock more finance and enabling support for women in business, drawing on insights from across the Alliance network and the East African ecosystem in particular. Summit highlights by panel are shared here.
Closing the 2-day event was a workshop for the WFID Community of Champions, a collaborative platform launched in 2022 to enable regulators and policymakers to exchange experiences and strategies related to the collection and use of supply-side data to advance women’s financial inclusion. In line with the Summit theme, this fourth annual in-person gathering saw policy makers from nine countries share their latest innovations using sex-disaggregated data to design and measure policies to enable women entrepreneurs’ in particular. Key takeaways are shared here.
The Summit dovetailed nicely with the Women Entrepreneurs (WE) Finance Code Study Tour which took place on May 30. Again, a record crowd of 130 Code Champions (Central Banks, Trade Associations, Data Aggregators, FSP signatories and We-Fi implementing partners) from 18 countries as well as change-makers from 22 countries who have not yet implemented the Code attended. The day was packed with insights on the impressive progress being made on the Code across countries and culminated in a deep dive into the tools developed to support implementation. The momentum is real.
This month we are also proud to share an updated version of our Business Case Tool which enables users to calculate the value of targeting Women’s Markets in their country.
Also excited to announce this month that this year’s All Stars Academy is taking place in-person from September 7 to 11 in Amman, Jordan, hosted by our member Bank al Etihad. This 4.5-day intensive learning experience is exclusive to Alliance members. Whether an institution is looking to design a women-centered strategy or is looking to refresh the strategy or re-skill the team, the All Stars Academy is a transformative learning experience. Taught by members, participants are immersed in the A – Z of implementing a commercially viable Women’s Markets and workforce DEI strategy. You can check out the curriculum and register here.
This month we are delighted to welcome our newest member Unibank, Panama to the Alliance. In this newsletter, we interview John Rozo Uribe, CEO, who shares the bank’s strategy for supporting Women’s Markets in Panama.
Finally, a big shout out to the Winners of the 2025 Champions of the Female Economy Awards announced at the Summit. We are very proud of their awesome performance in Women’s Markets and workforce gender DEI; and for their outstanding efforts to support others to do the same. Please note to qualify to get into the pool and be assessed for an award, members must have sent in their Female Economy Analytics Survey by early May. For those members who have not yet sent in this important survey, please do so by July 11. This allows us to develop benchmarking reports for you to evaluate yourself against your peers, and the more data we have the better the benchmarking!
We are very much looking forward to seeing Unibank and other members at the All Stars Academy in September. For those of you keen to learn more about joining the Alliance click here.
In community,
