COVID-19 Exclusion Working Group (Gender) – Introduction and Strategic Enablers for Digital Payments Toolkit

COVID-19 is causing unprecedented health, economic and social crises and threatens the poverty and inclusion gains that have been made over the last decade.

Inclusive digital payments solutions for the garment sector workers in Bangladesh

Advancing Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion

Report by the Better Than Cash Alliance, Women’s World Banking, and the World Bank Group for the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion under the Saudi G20 Presidency

Op-Ed: As COVID-19 presents Africa with conflicting choices between relief for today and investing for tomorrow, here’s why it needs to consider digitization

25 years since Beijing – Spotlight on women!

Digital Wages in Bangladesh Benefit Women

Mobile Coverage and its Impact on Digital Financial Services

"The study finds that the type of mobile coverage provided has a significant effect on the DFS UI and type of mobile phone that can be used for DFS access.Feature phones and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data transactions continue to be the choice for the vast majority users."

Inclusive Growth: The Global Challenges of Social Inequality and Financial Inclusion

The book outlines a journey from enabling models of government and business to strategies for creating both financial and social inclusion and entrepreneurism as mechanisms for sustainable and inclusive growth.

In Bangladesh, key public and private sector actors commit to scaling digital wages across garment sector

Dhaka, November 20, 2019 - Media release by Government of Bangladesh: Building on what has been achieved so far, the government and the private sector have committed to working together to solve the challenges in ensuring all garment factories pay their workers digitally. The decision came from the Bangladesh Digital Wages Summit, which convened on 20 November in Dhaka.

Call to action: Digitizing workers’ payments in the garment sector in Bangladesh

Leading brands call on other companies and suppliers in Bangladesh to grasp the opportunity to drive inclusion, efficiency, and transparency through wage digitization

Bangladesh Digital Wages Summit

Scaling Digital Wages: An Opportunity for Garment Employees and Manufacturers

Closing gender gap through fintech

This ADBI brief discusses policy interventions that can help governments in the Asia Pacific region leverage fintech to close the gender gap in financial inclusion. It calls for ensuring tailored services that promote ease of use, flexible regulation to promote access and active coordination among relevant government ministries to enhance financial education. 

The mobile gender gap: Asia

The top barriers to mobile ownership in Asia are literacy and skills and affordability, with family disapproval also featuring as a major barrier in parts of South Asia. Read GSMA's Mobile Gender Gap-Asia report for more details.

How greater financial control impacts gender norms

New NBER paper finds that transferring money directly into women's accounts and providing them financial training led to their increased participation in the labor force. In the long run, it states that the financial independence led to liberalization of gender norms.

Voices to Choices : Bangladesh's Journey in Women's Economic Empowerment

This World Bank publication analyzes advances in women's economic engagement and employment in Bangladesh. It has a great chapter on how to promote use and control of financial assets (among women) through digital technologies.  

Blockchain for Social Business: Principles and Applications

This paper investigates the application of Blockchain technology to address some of the key challenges in the domain of Social Business (SB).

Designing "smart" to overcome gender bias 

Women face additional constraints because of their gender that affect their economic performance. New Oxford University Press paper suggests that specific design features - repeated micro-lending, variation in loan terms, private savings accounts, etc - in financial services can yield more positive economic outcomes for women. 

How to promote women's digital financial inclusion

Prepared at the request of the G7 French Presidency, this Gates Foundation report aims to be "a blueprint for improving digital financial inclusion in Africa." It draws on the Foundation's experience of working in this area for 15 years and shares five pillars for enabling access to digital financial services in the continent.

Mobile-delivered economic ID for inclusion of SMEs

Unregistered SMEs account for 65% of Nigeria's GDP. Most of them often struggle to demonstrate their personal and business credentials to service providers and customers. This GSMA research finds that there is a need for new approaches to identity and mobile-delivered ‘economic ID’ solution holds promise.