By Toronto Centre

Financial inclusion of women brings disproportionate benefits to their families and to economic development, yet in many countries an access-to-finance gender gap remains. Sex-disaggregated data (SDD) is key to monitoring and addressing this problem.

This study examines the role that financial services regulators can play in efforts to address financial inclusion of women: how they are using, or could use, SDD to enhance women’s access to and use of financial products and services of the right quality that meet their needs; and how new technologies could help.

We worked with supervisory authorities in pilot countries in Africa (Kenya, Zambia)1 and South America (Colombia, Peru)2 to understand their experience to date and the key barriers and enablers of enhanced use of SDD to improve women’s financial inclusion.

We explored how the authorities in each country were collecting, analyzing, and using sexdisaggregated data. We also considered how that data related to both their regulatory mandates and activities and to the wider national effort to enhance financial inclusion of women to assess the extent to which regulators were, or could be, agents for change.

We used a causal chain (see diagram on page 16) to help us pinpoint where interventions could be made to enhance the collection, analysis, and use of SDD. We developed a maturity model drawing on six dimensions that interact to create the conditions for the optimal use of SDD: regulatory remit and capabilities, technological capabilities, financial inclusion focus, gender equality focus, market maturity, and infrastructure (physical, legal, and institutional).

In each of our pilot jurisdictions, we found areas of strength in some of these dimensions and areas that were less developed, or that needed to move to a next level of maturity as the market evolved and the financial inclusion challenge shifted from an entry-level goal to a next level of maturity. This may have been shifting from access to informal products to formal products, access to a single gateway product to a suite of products, or from access alone to use and quality.

Regulators often play a critical role in sourcing or collecting data to monitor the state of financial inclusion in their country. In our studies, they often did not collect or made less use of SDD in their core supervisory activities and were less clear on how a gender-sensitive approach would help them in regulatory activities, what SDD they would need to do so, and how they would use it.

Without clarity on how to use the data, improvements in technological and analytics capabilities are unlikely to be channeled towards using SDD in ways that effectively promote financial inclusion of women. We identified fertile areas for further development. Some relate to removing barriers to access, while others help with the usage and quality aspects of financial inclusion and consumer protection at a next level of market maturity.

Read the study here