Digital financial services can help bridge the gender gap in account ownership and access to credit by decreasing the cost of access to financial services and bypassing constraints imposed by social norms and limited mobility. Digital financial services can also contribute to women’s empowerment and autonomy by increasing their control over their financial resources. Data and insights from Global Findex have shown that digital financial services, including mobile money, have contributed to a marked increase in women's access to financial services in many economies in recent years (Global Findex 2017). Digital technology can enhance women’s ability to control and access financial services, including remittances and wage payments, through the use of debit/credit cards, mobile phones, and other digital channels. Digital infrastructure, including digital IDs and biometric verification, can facilitate customer on-boarding and customer due diligence, often major barriers to access to finance.

In environments where women are less likely than men to own assets that could serve as collateral for credit, the World Bank Group has successfully piloted the use of psychometric testing. (See box below: Improving Access to Credit for Women Through the Use of Alternatives to Collateral.) Analysis of big data, including data accessed through mobile phones and utility bills, can improve understanding of entrepreneurs’ cash flow, character traits, and networks to assess credit default risk and predict the likelihood of loan repayment.

Mobile money and e-Wallets have been game changers in a number of developing countries, by bringing formal financial services within the reach of a majority of the population for the first time. Kenya is a global leader in mobile money, with the M-Pesa products that offer a phone-based money transfer service, payments, and microfinancing services.

Access to the M-Pesa mobile money system has been adopted by at least one member in 75 percent of households and is estimated to have lifted 194,000 (2 percent) of households out of poverty, with a greater impact on women (Suri and Jack 2016). The relative impact of mobile money versus more traditional bank accounts for women’s financial services varies among countries.

While mobile money holds potential, intervention designs must be sensitive to country context and consumer risks, including online abuse and fraud. Many microentrepreneurs do not have formal accounts and therefore no pathway to savings, credit, or other financial products and services provided by financial service providers that could help their businesses expand. MSMEs generally rely on multiple forms of consumer finance to meet both personal and business operating needs. For example, over six million Kenyans have taken out at least one digital loan for meeting day-to-day household needs and for working capital for small enterprises. According to a 2019 report by Financial Sector Deepening Kenya, usage of non-regulated digital credit grew from 0.6 percent in 2016 to 8.3 percent in 2019. Governments need to proactively review these new digital finance products as part of the larger discussion on how finance and credit can be made more attainable for the many microentrepreneurs and others who are unbanked and operate unregistered firms on the margins of a developing country’s economy.

The automated data-generation tool in this toolkit is available online and provides comprehensive country snapshots of the context in which female entrepreneurs and workers operate and allows for country and regional comparisons. At the click of a button, the tool generates country-level information across some 125 indicators.

The matrix helps teams match barriers identified during analysis with potential interventions to lower them. It also suggests digital enablers for each intervention category and provides a corresponding project example.

The matrix is organized according to the toolkit’s four main constraint categories (legal and regulatory; access to finance; training, skills, and information; access to markets). For each category, barriers faced by women entrepreneurs are listed. These barriers are economic and social factors that may affect the general population, business community, or women as a group and, as such, represent obstacles causing WMSME growth to stagnate, such as encumbering processes for establishing and formalizing businesses, inhibiting access to the resources needed to fuel growth, and/or restricting information and communication flows among stakeholders. It is important for project teams to use the findings from the diagnostic to determine which barriers are most critical to address in project design.

The interventions proposed are drawn from WBG projects and from some non-WBG initiatives. Where possible the matrix categorizes interventions according to their track record for results, that is, the extent to which evidence demonstrates an intervention's impact (World Bank Group 2019b). It should be noted, however, that most of the categorized interventions were delivered without digital enablers. For the most recent and current impact evaluations and research please visit the WBG Regional Gender Innovation Labs.

Intervention Design Matrix

CLICK HERE to access the full Matrix, including features to create your own customized report by constraint, region, and level of evidence

The finance and credit portion of the matrix presents constraining factors and potential interventions related to women’s access to the financial products and services required to launch, operate, and grow their businesses.

This section presents a menu of gender-related output, outcome, and impact indicators to measure project results by choosing gender indicator/s that align(s) with the gaps that the project is trying to address; track(s) expected results; and is/are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). When selecting indicators, work with your M&E team, as well as with a gender specialist, to confirm and validate indicator choice; also consider sex-disaggregating indicators across the project, i.e., for those activities that may not specifically address gender gaps but that are amenable to sex-disaggregated data collection. Focus on indicators that make sense for your project and for which you will be able to collect data. The indicators can be applied to both lending and advisory World Bank projects.