MFWW 2021: Empowering Women on a Journey Towards Digital Financial Capability

This week we held our first event in the new #MFWW2021 Thought Leadership Series! The event, Empowering Women on a Journey Towards Digital Financial Capability (DFC), highlighted the fact that digital and financial capabilities are no longer a "nice to have" in financial inclusion, but a “must have” to ensure women are not left behind.

 As Women's World Banking's Marina Dimova noted, DFC is a critical component for digital transformation and the journey is not easy. It’s important to support women customers AND financial service providers. CGAP/FinEquity's Catherine Highet said, “We can’t put the onus on women to do the learning, it has to be from both sides.” 

I also appreciated CFI's Julia Arnold highlighting the role regulators and policymakers play in promoting DFC. Gathering sex-disaggregated data is critical, and "it may not be simple, but it's so powerful" for measuring what services work well for women compared to men.

Near the end of the panel, Ujjivan Founder Samit Ghosh shared a critical truth he learned through his career about launching new financial technologies from ATMs to mobile banking apps. While many still believe low-income communities are “technology adverse,” his experience indicates that this is absolutely wrong. "They actually need these technology services, and they will adapt and learn very fast as long as it is useful for them."

We also received great questions from the audience, including this one about whether financial service providers were integrating DFC Programs into their business model, and whether there is any evidence that such programs can support client acquisition or retention. Marina shared an example from the project Women's World Banking did in partnership with Dutch-Bangla Bank (DBBL) in Bangladesh. DBBL was eager to see more active usage of accounts held by female garment workers. After speaking with the women, though, we discovered that they had only been trained to cash out payments that had been deposited into their mobile wallets; they simply didn’t know what else could been done with the wallet. In response, Women’s World Banking and DBBL built a learning-by-doing-program to teach women customers how to perform other transactions as well. At DBBL, this learning-by-doing approach increased likelihood of women doing a transaction by 76%.

 Thank you to everyone who joined the event, and for showing how committed the #financialinclusion community is to keeping women’s financial inclusion front and center during the pandemic. This week we had a fantastic turnout: 436 attendees from 26 countries. Your participation today is a testament to our decision to go virtual for 2021! Although we plan to reunite in-person again in 2022, there’s so much work to share now with the global community in order to ensure women have all the financial tools they need.

Thank you again to our speakers, Julia Arnold, Marina Dimova, Samit Ghosh, Catherine Highet, Lubasha Heredia, and Eva Johansson for your valuable insights. Also, many thanks to our Advancing Sponsor, EY, our Broadening Sponsors, BCG, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and the European Investment Bank, and our Contributing Partner, FinEquity. And of course, a special thank you to our core funders DFAT, Sida, and the Visa Foundation for supporting our work.

If you missed today's event, watch it in the #MFWW2021 Library: https://bit.ly/3aObCl8

Our next event in the series, Leveraging Digital Platforms for Deepening Women's Financial Inclusion, will be held in June. Stay tuned for more details!