As governments, private sector leaders and civil society organizations were preparing to make commitments to the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, on June 30th 2021, UNCDF and FinEquity worked to enable turning commitments into action. During a virtual event facilitated by Diana Dezso from FinEquity and Antonique Koning, CGAP’s Gender Lead, UNCDF launched its new Inclusive Digital Economies & Gender Equality Playbook.

The Playbook is a practical guide on leveraging the market system development approach to decrease the digital and financial divide for women and girls, use technology to improve women’s economic opportunities, and transform women into builders of digital economies. It contains a wealth of research on the common constraints faced by women in least developed and emerging economies, and examples of interventions that can identify and address those constraints. The Playbook is a living document, and has integrated extensive feedback from several industry leaders, including the Center for Financial Inclusion, CGAP, FinEquity, GSMA, Strategic Impact Advisors, Women’s World Banking and many more.

Why is this important at this moment?

The Generation Equality Forum has generated a lot of excitement from stakeholders, who committed more than $40 billion towards the advancement of gender equality. Yet, addressing market constraints to women’s digital and financial inclusion requires commitments to translate into action on the ground in the global south. Thus came the Inclusive Digital Economy and Gender Equality Playbook, a key pillar of UNCDF’s Equal Economies commitment. Using the terminology of sports, this Playbook helps practitioners on the ground identify market constraints to women’s economic empowerment and that offers examples of interventions which could be implemented.

Launching the Playbook, with a spotlight on Industry Leaders from UNCDF

During the Playbook launch, several practitioners from UNCDF shared their experience working towards advancing women’s economic empowerment in some of the most vulnerable countries in the world. They showcased how the Playbook either served to highlight interventions that are worth replicating or advised them on future actions. Two launches were held – one for the Asia-Pacific regions and one for the Africa region.

Nandini Harihareswara, UNCDF Senior Advisor on Inclusive Digital Economies, co-led the session, highlighting how the Playbook fits within UNCDF’s commitment to promote digital economies that leave no one behind, especially making Women Builders of Digital Economies. Nandini introduced the structure of the Playbook and offered concrete examples on how to use it. The 4 workstreams upon which the Playbook is built – Skills, Innovation, Infrastructure, Policy & Regulation –are aligned with UNCDF’s global Inclusive Digital Economy strategy, which uses a markets approach, addressing market constraints in each of these workstreams, to co-create inclusive digital economies. Each section begins with an overview of the most common market constraints for women, and then gives a list of good practice and guides that give examples of interventions or categories of interventions that can address each market constraint.

Jagdeep Dahiya, UNCDF’s country lead for Papua New Guinea (PNG), picked up on two of the workstreams – infrastructure and innovation – showing their role in hindering women’s economic inclusion in the country. “PNG is the land of the unexpected and is full of opportunities”, said Jagdeep. Yet, its population, 80% of which is rural, faces several development challenges, with women struggling the most. In PNG, only 37% has access to formal financial services. One of the reasons lies is the low number of financial intermediaries, most of which are in urban areas, and are hard to reach for rural women.

Elaborating on best practices from the Playbook, Jagdeep explained how UNCDF’s intervened to address this constraint. Understanding the need to bring bank access points closer to women, UNCDF partnered with PNG’s Women’s Micro Bank, supporting the development of rural-friendly “Mama Bank Access Points”. Being biometrically enabled, such access points only require a tablet and a biometric reader to function and are set for both online and offline transactions. Previously illiterate women customers suffered from friends and family fraudulently accessing their account given their signature were a simple scribble or just an “X”. Biometric access has allowed women to protect their account and increased their trust in having a bank account. UNCDF has also been encouraging access to finance to the many women’s micro entrepreneurs around the country (called table mamas), thereby supporting the bank with the provision of small loans.

Myanmar©2020 UNCDF, Sam Eaton

Maria Perdomo, UNCDF’s Regional Manager for Asia, brought in the experience of women in Bangladesh, highlighting the market constraints faced by women microentrepreneurs in terms of skills and innovation.

Creating 90% of jobs in the country, microenterprises are the driving force of Bangladesh, with women being at the forefront of such informal businesses. Yet, when it comes to formal businesses, only 7.2% are women-led. Also, women in Bangladesh are largely left behind from the fast-paced digital innovations taking place in the country. Preliminary research from UNCDF’s Inclusive Digital Economy Scorecard points to a 36% gender digital divide in Bangladesh. Moreover, there is a 24% gender gap in mobile phone ownership and a 66% gap in mobile money account ownership.

Reflecting on some interventions highlighted in the Playbook, Maria emphasized the importance of investing in women’s skills to drive their access to finance. UNCDF’s work with the private sector in Bangladesh is a good example of how by strengthening women’s financial literacy and digital skills can improve their access to and use of e-commerce platforms. But innovation, infrastructure and skills alone are not enough to drive women’s economic empowerment.

This point was reinforced by Wycliffe Ngwabe, UNCDF’s country lead for Sierra Leone. He emphasized the importance of policy and regulations in restricting women’s empowerment and recalled the key role of governments in enabling an environment which is favorable to women.

Sierra Leone©2020 UNCDF, Jake Lyell Photography LLC

Compared to other countries in the region, Sierra Leone has very low basic literacy levels, with 70% of its workforce employed in agriculture. Less than 25% of the population has a formal financial account, and smartphone ownership is around 20%. Women in Sierra Leone face several policy and regulatory constraints, including the large underrepresentation at decision making level and gender-blind Know-Your-Customer (KYC) requirements.

To address some of those market constraints, UNCDF has leveraged public-private partnerships. It has been working with Sierra Leone’s Central Bank, to increase the voice of women in the construction of better consumer protection guidelines. Similarly, it has been supporting regulators in developing a national digital ID platform as well as tiered KYC requirements to counter the low levels of national ID ownership among women. To support the private sector, UNCDF is also encouraging innovative financial services and instruments, such as loans, guarantees and non-collateral-based financing models, which can support the growth of female-led and owned microenterprises.

Similar problems, different solutions?
We are in a unique moment in time where the Generation Equality Forum, along with the African Union’s Decade of Women’s Financial and Economic Inclusion and many others are working to renew, connect and fund closing the financial and digital gender gaps for women. As Antonique Koning concluded, to achieve this vision, the Playbook must be a living document that inspires. She encouraged the over 4,000 practitioners reached by FinEquity globally to not only use the Playbook, but also make it a public good that will be further improved by the community as we continue to learn and evolve “good practice” on how to make women builders of digital economies.

Postscript
After the launch of the playbook, UNCDF has been requested by two regional bodies to give trainings on the IDE & Gender Playbook: the Arab Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank. There is a strong appetite for program managers, central bankers and others to have a framework by which to understand how women’s digital and financial inclusion can be improved.