Global awareness around women’s financial inclusion is at an all-time high, yet the global gender gap in financial inclusion persists and women continue to be both unserved and underserved. These challenges continue in part because the availability of global and national level supply-side sex-disaggregated data remains extremely limited. As of 2019, only 44 countries reported sex-disaggregated data to the IMF Financial Access Survey and most did so on a limited basis.

Financial services that are not tracking sex-disaggregated data within their own portfolio do not have an understanding of existing gender gaps and lack data to build a business case to develop market approaches for tailored solutions for women. Without supply-side sex-disaggregated data from financial service providers, policymakers cannot diagnose granular gaps in women’s financial access and usage and create effective, targeted policy changes.

The Women’s Financial Inclusion Data (WFID) Partnership was established in 2014 and is one of the leading voices on women’s financial inclusion data across the world.  WFID’s theory of change is that gender data can drive policy and market action to accelerate women’s access and use of financial services.

After focusing on awareness building and outreach during the partnership’s early years, the next phase of efforts centers around supporting country-level sex-disaggregated supply-side data collection with a specific focus on two stakeholders: financial service providers and policymakers. The holistic ecosystem approach will actively encourage supply side gender data in Nigeria, Kenya, Bangladesh, Honduras, Pakistan, Turkey, Lebanon by 2022.

ConsumerCentrix, in consortium with Andafin and World Data Lab, has been selected to support with the implementation of this second phase.