Our Mission

In 1975 the first-ever UN Women’s Conference focused on human rights. Courageous questions ignited critical conversations:  

How can a woman exercise her human rights without access to financial services in her own name? And isn’t a safe place to save a basic human right?  

Michaela Walsh, Esther Ocloo, Ela Bhatt, and Mary Okelo went on to found Women’s World Banking in 1979, a global non-profit organization dedicated to empowering low-income women and addressing the inequalities they face.  

Our mission is to drive women’s economic empowerment by expanding the assets, participation, and decision-making power of low-income women and their households through access to financial services, knowledge, and markets. We support policymakers to advance gender-inclusive financial systems and enable effective policy action. We work directly with financial institutions through regional advisory services to design and scale women-centered solutions, while strengthening institutions from within through gender-intentional strategies, capability building, and the use of gender-disaggregated data. Through Women’s World Banking Asset Management, we invest in institutions to expand women’s access to finance sustainably and at scale.

For more than forty-five years, Women’s World Banking has equipped low-income women with the financial tools, confidence, and agency to participate more fully and equally in their economies and societies.