Clarity Connect

Despite global progress, a stark paradox persists in South Asia. While gender gaps in basic bank account ownership are narrowing, women’s labour force participation remains among the lowest globally, at just 32%, compared with an average of 54% across emerging and developing economies (World Bank, 2024). The last decade has seen remarkable improvements in access. In South Asia, 66 percent of women and 70 percent of men now hold bank accounts, and digital financial services are expanding rapidly.

Financial inclusion has made significant strides, yet, access to accounts and capital alone is not translating into meaningful participation in the labour force. To close the gap, programs must address the deeper social, economic, and structural barriers. Interconnected structural and social barriers continue to limit women’s economic empowerment, including unequal power relations, unpaid care burdens, and restrictive social norms. Moreover, these challenges are compounded by external shocks and crises whether economic downturns, climate change, and political instability.

Traditional interventions including skilling programs, entrepreneurship finance, microfinance, digital literacy, are necessary but insufficient in addressing the interconnected challenges in women’s economic empowerment.

Next Frontier for Women’s Financial Inclusion Programs:

To be effective, the next frontier of women’s financial inclusion must move beyond access and capital to a more integrated approach. Programs should expand their focus to include four critical areas:

1. Improving quality of work and income: While improving women’s access to opportunities across sectors is crucial, many women in the region continue to work in low-wage, vulnerable sectors. According to the ILO (2023), half of women in Asia and the Pacific are employed in either agriculture (29%) or retail trade (22%). Focus of financial inclusion programs should expand to support women’s transition into more secure and higher-value opportunities beyond participation. The focus must shift from only increasing number of women clients or entrepreneurs to improving the quality of their work and income. This means supporting and designing programs that emphasize income stability, business growth, savings and investment.

Gender in Nigeria’s Aquaculture and Small-Scale Fisheries Value Chains project by WorldFish provides an example of integrated Gender Transformation Approach (GTA) which can also provide insights for integrated financial inclusion programs. The project assessed structural constraints including formal (policies), semiformal (systems), and informal (norms) limiting women’s empowerment. The design included diversifying sources of income among women who rely on aquaculture or small-scale fi­sheries as their means of livelihoods, e.g., involvement in poultry/livestock, tailoring, small/mid-size shop, among others. In addition, extension agents, cooperatives were leveraged to address gender inequities in technical skills and knowledge for production of good quality processed fish products.

2. Strengthening skills, literacy, and entrepreneurship: Access to capital can only empower women if accompanied by the skills and confidence to use it effectively. Women are still 41 percent less likely than men to use mobile internet and 15 percent less likely to own a mobile phone. Smartphone ownership reflects an even wider gender gap of 42 percent (GSMA, 2025). Data shows that women with tertiary education are five times more likely to be online than those with only primary education, highlighting the need for greater investment in education and skills training. Financial inclusion programs can integrate digital, financial, and social literacy. This could include embedding financial and digital skills in school curricula, promoting consumer protection and online safety, and building awareness of risks such as fraud and data misuse.

Greater economic participation by women requires addressing restrictive norms that limit women’s mobility and time. Childcare provision, engagement of men and boys in unpaid care, and investments in women’s safety are essential and programs can leverage existing outreach channels to include families and community in client education initiatives.

3. Mobilize and Leverage Partnerships – Effective gender mainstreaming requires multisectoral teams and partnerships. Governments, private sector actors, philanthropies, and civil society each bring unique strengths. Programs should embed partnerships across the entire project lifecycle, from design to implementation to monitoring while ensuring that financing is fit-for-purpose, blending commercial, concessional, and public capital where needed.

Women’s World Banking’s (WWB) program on nurturing women banking agents demonstrates the strength of partnerships which leverage key stakeholders. WWB works in India with government rural livelihood missions, national development agencies and public sector banks to increase the number of female bank agents, build the ability of women bank agents to grow their business, and provide financial services especially in rural areas.

4. Apply an Intersectional Lens to Data: Gender-disaggregated data requirements have improved in recent years, but the depth and quality of data remain uneven. Lessons from climate finance, where standardized measurement frameworks are increasingly used, can inform gender focused impact monitoring. A blend of qualitative and quantitative indicators is essential to capture women’s lived realities and to assess whether financial inclusion is translating into empowerment, not just access.

We also need to expand from a homogenous measurement of gender disaggregated data and gather metrics for different ‘women’ subsegments. Program design and measurement can capture differences across socioeconomic status, location, age, and education level. This also means moving beyond simple metrics like number of accounts opened or loans disbursed. Programs can additionally monitor intermediary outcomes such as:

• Quality of work and income
• Growth in business or enterprise income and investment
• Financial resilience and savings capacity
• Access to social protection and safety nets
• Shifts in household decision-making and agency

FinEquity and Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) have proposed 19 indicators for measuring women’s economic empowerment (WEE) within financial inclusion interventions. The guide released in March 2025 provides a reference framework which can be useful as a starting point to measure intermediary outcomes.

The challenge in the next frontier of women’s financial inclusion is whether programs can be redesigned to address systemic barriers, strengthen women’s agency, and create meaningful opportunities for work and enterprise. By focusing on quality of work, embedding literacy and skills, building cross-sectoral partnerships, and measuring impact through an intersectional lens, we can move toward real transformation. This also requires increased funding for integrated programs which include broader social, economic, and policy interventions that enable and strengthen women’s inclusion and equity.