The global pandemic confronted policymakers with large-scale and fast-moving disruption. In turn, it also provides a wealth of experiences that this assignment of CCX sought to extract and assess. Over the summer of 2023, AFI shared these in a Special Report “Closing the Financial Inclusion Gender Gap During the Crisis and Afterwards”.

These insights draw upon deep-dive research, interviews with decision-makers and stakeholders, and a survey of more than a third of AFI members facilitated by the Gender Inclusive Finance (GIF) Team at AFI led by Helen Walbey and undertaken by the CCX team as the pandemic evolved over the course of 2021 and 2022. A set of five country case studies draws attention to how large emerging markets like Egypt and small ones like Paraguay or Fiji have been able to effectively respond to this massive crisis with the focus provided by a gender lens and financial inclusion policy.

These experiences should serve as inspiration and provide policymakers with a sense of possibility. But what should executives at central banks or regulatory agencies actually be doing during the next crisis – or even now?

To help provide such guidance, AFI published the “Gender-Sensitive Rapid Response and Crisis Recovery Policies” policy toolkit – a comprehensive guide for policymakers, practitioners, and development partners on designing and implementing gender-sensitive rapid response and crisis recovery policies.

Globally, 740 million women are excluded from financial sector services, and their inclusion could add approximately USD 12 trillion to the global domestic product. This is a vast untapped market for the financial sector. Taking evidence from the experiences of AFI members as expressed in the Special Report, gender-inclusive finance policies can reverse the previously widening gender inequality or access gaps. Besides the additional economic impact, benchmarking policymaking against the realities and constraints of women can strengthen economic stability and growth through improved women’s access to formal financial services, leading to positive outcomes for families and communities. And actually, this approach ends up working better also for many men. This strength of gender-inclusive finance at the center of the policy toolkit is highlighted by what outcomes various shades of gender-inclusive financial policy are likely to deliver – as illustrated in the toolkit here.

Gender-neutral policy designs are often benchmarked by the realities of men, and as a result, they only work for a minority of relatively privileged women. They do not consider the needs and constraints of the average female. The resulting policies or financial offers do not even work well for many men. Gender-intelligent or gender-intentional solutions start by setting the average woman and her constraints as a guideline, and they stand a good chance of adequately serving a majority of women. Gender-transformational policy design explicitly explores the intersectionality of challenges faced by the minority of excluded and marginalized women, and such policy solutions may often require more fundamental interventions.

In disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid response and crisis recovery policies that are charged by the power of gender-sensitive design are needed – the AFI Policy toolkit offers three main tools for developing these. The first toolkit explores the role of stakeholders in crisis response. Stakeholders such as donors, ministries and civil society organizations are likely to have networks related to vulnerable groups, and they can help communicate and mobilize interest for interventions in terms of crisis. The second toolkit offers a benchmarking tool for policymakers’ country’s context for gender-inclusive finance. The Excel-based tool developed by ConsumerCentriX allows policymakers to assess the context and baseline necessary for embedding crisis response, recovery and broader financial inclusion policies for AFI members and other stakeholders. The third toolkit explores gender-inclusive crisis response strategies that can be employed depending on the crisis response phase the country is on. These include:

• Fast-paced “fire fighting”
• Enabling recovery
• Building back better for resilience.

Overall, the toolkit provides a valuable resource that enables practitioners at central banks and financial sector regulators, as well as their peers at government ministries to design gender-inclusive financial policies that address barriers to financial inclusion for the majority of vulnerable segments, including women while also allowing them to collect wider sets of data and inputs for improving existing policies and putting in place strategies for future crisis response.

Learn more: AFI Policy Toolkit “Gender-Sensitive Rapid Response and Crisis Recovery Policies

Gaps between women and men in the access to and usage of formal financial services, such as bank accounts, credit facilities, and insurance remain large and in a few regions were even growing. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Gender Inclusive Finance (GIF), therefore, was a policy priority in many emerging markets. Already in 2016, the members of the Alliance for Finance Inclusion – central banks and financial regulatory institutions from 76 developing countries –  committed to halving these gender gaps in the Denarau Action Plan. But a fast-moving crisis that disrupted social and economic life might seem to suggest such priorities have to wait.

With deep-dive research, extensive stakeholder interviews, a survey of one-third of AFI members and the financial inclusion policy and solution design expertise of our team, ConsumerCentriX (CCX) supported AFI to explore the nexus of women’s financial inclusion and crisis response in the project “Closing the Financial Inclusion Gender Gap During the Crisis and Afterward”.

The evidence from pioneering AFI member experiences is clear and borne out in macroeconomic data and numbers of active users of financial services. Without a focus on women as the largest group of at-risk, under-served citizens, crises linger, recovery is slower and less stable, and countries can catch a case of “economic long-COVID”.

AFI members like Paraguay, Fiji, Egypt, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Togo, Ghana, and Rwanda show that even under the pressures of crisis, Gender Inclusive Finance should be in focus. It helps set the right priorities, mobilise the most impactful set of stakeholders, identify the key operational challenges, and target beneficiaries with a large multiplier effect. Enabled by the opportunities of digital finance that can be ramped up fast even for poor countries that had so far seen limited adoption, GIF gets crisis relief and stimulus to where it is needed most and makes sure economic life can continue.

Some of the key recommendations for policymakers and financial services providers include: