Women’s financial inclusion dashboards help regulators and policymakers centralize and visualize gender data from across the national ecosystem, surfacing timely insights. Most begin by focusing on individual account ownership by gender, region, and age. But account ownership is only a slice of the full picture. As the dashboards mature, central banks are adding gender breakdowns of MSME financing, including from sectors not regulated by central banks, such as micro-finance. The latest innovation? The integration of non-bank data, such as insurance and capital markets.
Case in point: two members of the WFID Community of Champions have just added new datasets to their WFI dashboards, and the early findings are reshaping assumptions about who is included in each country’s financial system.
Remittances Data Reveals a Bigger, More Complex Picture in Uganda
Starting in January 2024, Bank of Uganda (BoU) set out to expand remittances reporting: going beyond banks and money remitters to include payment service providers and forex bureaus and capturing far more detail per transaction.
The payoff was significant: the more granular data showed $1 billion in previously uncaptured remittance inflows, moving the recorded total from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion a year, largely reflecting flows through mobile money that the old system didn’t pick up. As a result, mobile money has overtaken cash and is now the leading inflow channel.
The new data also deepened gender insights: the female share of remittance receivers rose from 23.5 percent to 32.4 percent, while senders continue to heavily skew male. As BoU’s Director of Statistics Milly Isingoma reflected, “I was expecting the women to be receiving more of the remittances. Maybe the women are not as supported as I thought.”
The remittances data is part of a project to upgrade the reporting of gender data received by the Central Bank, redesigning the reporting template from 8-10 variables to more than 50 indicators and running weekly check-ins to troubleshoot submissions. As Isingoma put it: “We did not wait to be perfect. We believe that when you first share the data insights, you get more people on board, and then you get perfect together.” Explore Uganda’s WFI dashboard: https://bou.or.ug/microdata
Insurance and Capital Markets Data Test Assumptions in Bangladesh
Bangladesh Bank’s WFI dashboard launched in 2022 covering banks, finance companies, mobile financial service providers, and microfinance institutions. It has now taken the major step to add insurance and capital markets. Both are regulated outside the central bank, requiring new interagency data-sharing agreements and reporting templates.
The insurance data, covering some 20 million policies, delivered a genuine surprise. Where gender-disaggregated banking data typically shows women lagging, Bangladesh’s insurance sector shows the opposite: women hold 49 percent of policies to men’s 43 percent, with women holding 61 percent of micro-insurance policies.
Capital markets told a more familiar story: of 1.2 million beneficiary owner accounts, women hold just 24 percent to men’s 75 percent. The dashboard also revealed sharp geographic concentration, 79 percent of accounts sit in the Dhaka region.
Getting both sectors integrated took time: insurance data collection began in 2022 and wasn’t completed until 2026. While it was a long journey, getting there was only possible with the country having a national financial inclusion strategy and strong mandate from the government, which in turn supported cooperation among regulating bodies. Explore Bangladesh’s WFI dashboard: https://www.wfidbb.org.bd/home
Why It Matters
As far as we are aware, this is the first time gender-disaggregated remittances, insurance, and capital markets data have been integrated into national dashboards. This shows what can happen when gender-disaggregated datasets get expanded beyond banking: assumptions get tested, gaps become visible, and regulators gain concrete levers to move from partial financial inclusion of women to full financial enablement.
This dashboard work is implemented by the Alliance in collaboration with Consumer CentriX and is funded by the Gates Foundation. Learn more about how to build a national dashboard here.
