Overview
The Context
The Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks to expand access to digital financial services so the poorest people around the globe can build security and prosperity for themselves, their families, and their communities. As a key area of focus, the FSP team works toward the full participation of women through economic empowerment and financial inclusion, partly by addressing the barriers to women’s participation.
The Opportunity
In working toward their strategic vision for 2030, the FSP team aims to prioritize and address the most significant barriers for women in order to set new priorities and make new investment, collaboration, and advocacy decisions.
GRID’s Role
Through a consultative process with key financial inclusion organizations across the industry and rigorous secondary research, we conducted comprehensive research and analysis of the barriers women in FSP’s focus countries face in achieving economic empowerment and financial inclusion.
Year
2021-2023
Services
Research
Visual storytelling
Data visualization
Partner(s)
Strategic Impact Advisors
The Approach & Process
We conducted the following phases of work as a project team:
- Evidence Review: We analyzed secondary research on the barriers to WEE-FI and consulted a range of financial inclusion organizations to identify additional evidence of exemplars and interventions that demonstrated success in creating access for women. We reviewed nearly 300 source references and more than 20 organizations.
- Synthesis of Evidence: Using the evidence we gathered, we developed new insights, and ways to use the data to make it actionable for the FSP team and interested members of the financial inclusion industry.
- Data Visualization: We visualized complex, analytic insights (e.g. the Barriers Map) into digestible graphics, and finalized it within a multi-layered, interactive document.
The Outcome
We launched the final document, Barriers, Opportunities, and Exemplars: Women’s Economic Empowerment and Financial Inclusion, and its accompanying microsite in September 2022.
The final project document included an analysis of the barriers women faced in FSP’s focus countries with insight into how the barriers contextualized into respective markets, and which barriers proved to be most prevalent among countries.
Our work also included a diagnostic tool for the FSP team and implementation partners to determine important barriers in specific markets, and a compendium of exemplar interventions to inspire new solutions for women’s economic empowerment.
Click here to see the project’s microsite.
