Women’s Financial Inclusion Toolkit

Financial inclusion is recognized as a key driver of poverty reduction, resilience, and economic growth. Yet despite global progress, a persistent gender gap remains. Women are less likely than men to own bank accounts, use digital financial services, access formal credit, or hold leadership positions within the financial sector. Structural barriers—including legal restrictions, social norms, lower mobile phone ownership, limited financial literacy, and restricted asset ownership—continue to hinder women’s full participation in financial systems 

Why Women’s Financial Inclusion Matters

WFI is embedded within broader goals of Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE), gender equality, and sustainable development.

Evidence shows that increasing women’s access to financial services contributes to Poverty reduction and increased household income, Growth of women-led businesses, Improved savings and risk management, Greater resilience to shocks, Better education, health, and nutrition outcomes and increased agency and decision-making power

WFI is also aligned with international commitments, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Denarau Action Plan, and global initiatives such as the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion 

A Structured Approach to Designing WFI Interventions

The toolkit provides guidance across four key stages of a WFI intervention:

• Scoping: Conducting gender and financial ecosystem analysis, identifying barriers (legal, supply-side, demand-side, and social norms), and defining project objectives and target groups.
• Design: Setting clear objectives linked to WEE outcomes, defining specific women segments (e.g., entrepreneurs, farmers, youth), and developing gender-inclusive financial products and policy interventions.
• Implementation: Building partnerships, strengthening institutional capacity, promoting inclusive product development, and integrating financial and non-financial services.
• Measuring WFI: Tracking gender-disaggregated data, monitoring usage (not just access), and assessing impact on empowerment and economic outcomes.

The toolkit emphasizes that WFI interventions must go beyond access to focus on quality, usage, and enabling environments, including regulation, supervision, and supporting institutions 

Understanding Barriers to Women’s Financial Inclusion

The toolkit outlines common constraints, including Lack of identification documents, Collateral requirements and asset ownership gaps, Restrictive legal frameworks, Gender norms limiting mobility and financial autonomy, Digital gender gaps (mobile ownership, fintech usage) and Patronizing service delivery and male-dominated financial institutions

It highlights the critical role of social norms diagnostics and gender-sensitive programming to either work around or gradually transform restrictive norms.

Practical Tools and Project Ideas

The toolkit offers Diagnostic questions and scoping checklists, Case studies from multiple countries, Project ideas addressing supply-side and demand-side constraints, Guidance on collecting sex-disaggregated data, Methods for conducting gender analysis (interviews, focus groups, surveys, financial diaries) and Policy and regulatory reform options
It serves both as a technical reference and an inspirational resource for designing scalable, context-specific WFI interventions.

A Living Resource

Built on GIZ’s longstanding expertise in gender finance, the toolkit is designed as a living document intended to evolve as new data, lessons, and innovations emerge. It supports practitioners in integrating women’s financial inclusion across sectors, including rural development, climate adaptation, migration, and private sector development.

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