Gender Finance

In most countries women are still less likely than men to be financially included. Therefore, GOPA AFC works continuously on reducing the gap and enhancing women’s economic empowerment worldwide.

The three existing main strategies to reduce gender inequalities in the access to financial products for female led businesses are: i) specific credit lines for women-led businesses; ii) a diversified workforce at financial institutions, including female loan officers; and iii) tailored programs for women entrepreneurs which include training and specific financial products.

GOPA AFC has been successfully training bank staff in integrating a gender perspective and analysed barriers for women-led businesses to access financial products and services. In Nigeria for example, our in-house experts advise the Central Bank on women’s financial inclusion, proposing to encourage gender balance in agent networks (read more about the project here).

We also supported the Central Bank of Egypt in evidence-based policy making for greater financial inclusion of individuals and MSMEs, where special focus was put on the prevailing gender disparities (read more about the project here).

In our Financial Sector Programme in East and Central Africa almost half of the over 25,000 MSMEs trained by us were female. We further provided capacity building support to partner financial institutions in gender finance, including the assessment of the gender policy and development of a dedicated gender strategy. Moreover, we organised gender focused training workshops on how to promote women within the banks (learn more about the project here).

In addition, we ensure to mainstream the topic into general project implementation, including gender sensitive monitoring and reporting. We have in-house experts for the topic of gender and finance in the Financial Sector Development team, analyse the gender ratio among our teams of experts and raise staff’s awareness and sensitivity about the topic.