Women's World Banking Blog

Blog

Explore the latest global and regional insights from Women’s World Banking’s work in policy, leadership, women’s entrepreneurship, gender lens investing, and more.

Latest Posts

Client Stories

Latifah’s Story

Dendev’s tailoring business hit a familiar trap: she needs money to grow her business and she needs to grow her business to make money. Enter Xacbank.

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Client Stories

Allen’s Story

Dendev’s tailoring business hit a familiar trap: she needs money to grow her business and she needs to grow her business to make money. Enter Xacbank.

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Products & Solutions

Making Mobile Money Work for Women

With a growing gender gap in financial inclusion in Bangladesh, it is imperative to understand the behavioral barriers women face when engaging with digital financial services.

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Research & Perspectives

Indian Women Aren’t Using Their Bank Accounts. This Is How and Why Women’s World Banking Plans to Change That.

India has experienced exponential growth and enacted innovative financial initiatives in recent years, but promising indicators of greater financial inclusion mask a concerning trend. About half of the women in India with personal bank accounts use them in a limited capacity or not at all. Women’s World Banking’s India Strategy

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WWB News

Introducing She Counts Members

She Counts, a global platform that harnesses the power of financial services to put savings and financial tools in the hands of women, enabling them to plan for a more prosperous future.

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Products & Solutions

Powering Economies by Investing in Women

Women’s World Banking’s recent Making Finance Work for Women Summit brought together leaders from the public and private sectors, investors, and researchers to discuss, debate and create the solutions to drive women’s financial inclusion globally.

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Leadership & Diversity

Introducing the Leadership and Diversity Program for Regulators: a new program of inclusive policy design and leadership development for financial regulators

Policymakers have the opportunity to play game changer in driving women’s financial inclusion efforts. However, a strong, gender-diverse team within the regulatory body needs to be in place to amplify these efforts. Women’s World Banking and AFI’s Leadership & Diversity for Regulators program provides the tools to design inclusive policies

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Products & Solutions

How to Create Financial Products that Win with Women

Often, many financial services providers only superficially tailor their products in order to reach the women’s market. If f they are to reach this untapped segment, they must articulate a clear business case, avoid being “gender-neutral” and use gender segmentation during product design and to meet women’s needs.

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Gender Lens Investing

An Open Letter to Scammers

A public service announcement concerning investments, fundraising and representation of our gender lens impact investment fund, Capital Partners.

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WWB News

We All Win When She Saves

Women’s World Banking hosted a Twitter chat to hear from three organizations about how they’re helping women build a better future through digital savings while creating a more sustainable business.

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WWB News

Global SME Finance Forum 2017

This year’s SME Finance Forum will include interactive sessions, study tours to high-performing institutions, fintech demos, a B2B marketplace & networking sessions.

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Leadership & Diversity

Have you found your ikigai?

Our Management Development Program at NBS Bank (Malawi) helped managers understand their core values and leverage their differences to better work together to serve women.

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Research & Perspectives

Women are at the heart of sustainable business

Last year, I was invited to be a part of the Business & Sustainable Development Commission which brings together leaders from business, finance, civil society, labor, and international organizations to develop a private sector response to the challenges presented by the Global Goals.  Specifically, the Commission has the “twin aims

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Products & Solutions

The complexity of increasing demand for microinsurance and what we can do about it

The poor are vulnerable to risk, a cause of persistent poverty. Microinsurance is one solution to mitigate risk, yet demand remains disappointingly low. This article looks at lessons learned and selective recommendations for increasing demand, based on academic studies and the experiences of over 60 innovation partners of the ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility.

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WWB News

Recap: #BuildOnBeijing Twitter Chat

A summary of the chat hosted by Women’s World Banking, featuring The Clinton Foundation’s No Ceilings and UN Women’s Empower Women in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

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WWB News

Who Should Attend the Global Meeting

The Global Meeting is an opportunity for the head of an organization and a high-potential leader. The high-potential leader should be already occupying a leadership role within the organization and reporting directly to the CEO.

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Research & Perspectives

Why we should all #BankOnHer

Our goal is to remind our allies and supporters that financial inclusion must include the one billion women that don’t have access to basic financial products and services. The current interventions are working, but mostly for men.

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WWB News

Are you making it happen for women?

Throughout March you’ll see videos of our amazing network members, partners and advocates talking about how they’re making it happen for women around the world, in honor of International Women’s Day and more.

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General

The idea and the opportunity that helped Mirjana thrive

By MI-BOSPO Before the Bosnian war, Mirjana Parhomov  was a safety engineer living quietly in the town of Bijeljina, Bosnia. During the war’s aftermath however, she was one of many who were left without a job, an income and a home. “It”s hard when you are left without a home

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Products & Solutions

Deepening financial inclusion for microentrepreneurs in Mexico

Mexico is one of the most populous countries in Latin America so it is not surprising that they have one of the largest number of microfinance clients: a whopping six million borrowers which is roughly 5% of the population (2013). Yet there is something distinct about how microfinance has developed

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Products & Solutions

The “who” matters in delivering financial education

The financial education industry as a whole has stopped short in examining who or what kind of individual is most successful in delivering financial education. We share our experience of three different educator profiles in various projects around the world.

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Leadership & Diversity

The two must-haves of a leadership training to drive lasting change

After launching our leadership and diversity program offerings in 2009, Women’s World Banking set out to study how leadership trainings can best translate into bigger and more sustained changes at the institutional level. We asked ourselves: what aspects of our program design most effectively drove this kind of change?

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Research & Perspectives

Three reasons low-income women don’t save in a bank

Low-income want to save, can save and need a safe place to save. While creating savings programs for the poor is not easy, we firmly believe that serving women makes business sense. Neither women nor banks can afford to miss this opportunity.

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Client Stories

Rani’s Story

Parveen took her family from the brink of poverty to business success with her microentrepreneur’s spirit and the support of Kashf Foundation.

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WWB News

Stories from the field: Deutsche Bank volunteers support a Women’s World Banking network member

The volunteers were in Bolivia as part of DB’s Corporate Community Partnership (CCP) Program, a volunteer program aimed at providing employees an opportunity to use their skills to support a DB partner organization in a meaningful way. Given Women’s World Banking’s long relationship with DB, we were honored to facilitate Pedro, Costina and Katharina’s engagement with FUNBODEM. This is the eighth time over the last six years that DB employees have volunteers to work work with a Women’s World Banking Network member.

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Research & Perspectives

Have banks lost to mobile money in Tanzania?

Mobile money is gaining momentum in Tanzania. Would other financial services be able to catch up? Women’s World Banking visited Tanzania in October 2013 to conduct industry and customer research to understand what opportunities exist for mobile banking in Tanzania.

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WWB News

Assistance for MI-BOSPO clients affected by flood

Floods that hit Bosnia and Herzegovina last week inflicted enormous material damage to citizens. The real damage will not be known for a long time. MI-BOSPO launched emergency actions to assist its clients and employees. We have been collecting information on how many clients have lost their homes and property, in order for us to try to find ways to assist them.

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Products & Solutions

An unintended secret: microinsurance in Morocco

With support from Agence Française de Développement, Women’s World Banking went to Morocco in March of this year to meet with rural and urban clients of the institution to help AlAmana solve the mystery of why clients weren’t using their microinsurance.

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Products & Solutions

Just the tip of the iceberg: the hidden costs of healthcare in Uganda

“How much did you spend on healthcare last time you were hospitalized?” That was the question Women’s World Banking’s research team posed to more than 70 participants of focus groups organized in Uganda early this year as part of our project to introduce a health microinsurance product with our local network member. The question seems straightforward enough, a simple matter of sums. As we found however, most of the participants were not aware of the full cost of their hospitalization and even severely underestimated it.

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Products & Solutions

The long road to medical treatment in Uganda

Finance Trust Bank and Women’s World Banking are working together to develop and offer a health microinsurance product to help alleviate the financial burden of major illness for their low-income clients. We began our product development work as all Women’s World Banking projects do: with in-depth market research. Specifically in Uganda, we needed to understand the usage, needs, financing and costs for healthcare among low-income people, as well as their awareness of insurance.

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Leadership & Diversity

Investments that pay off- Building Strong Teams That Support Financial Inclusion

Besides the extent of their outreach and their ability to offer diverse products, an MFI’s success is now being measured by operational, financial, social, and gender indicators. In February 2014, Women’s World Banking’s Leadership and Gender Diversity program team provided Crecer, Crédito con Educación Rural in Bolivia just this opportunity to strengthen its team of managers through the Management Development Training program.

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General

A Rookie’s Guide to Women’s World Banking

When I tell people that I work at Women’s World Banking, I often get a curious look followed by strings of questions:  “Is it a bank for women?” “Is it a CIA front?”, or my favorite, “Can I get a loan from you?” The truth is, besides reciting the standard

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WWB News

Recap of our International Women’s Day “Ask Me Anything” on Twitter

Because International Women’s Day, March 8th, fell on a Saturday this year, we decided to dedicate our Twitter feed to the various ways we have been helping advance women’s economic empowerment through access to financial services and made our program experts available to anyone who wished to ask us anything about the topic of the day.

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Leadership & Diversity

What does it take to be an inspiring woman leader? An Online Roundtable for International Women’s Day

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, Women’s World Banking hosted an online roundtable with three alumni from our signature Women in Leadership program to reflect on their learnings from the program, how they have implemented these to become better leaders in their institution and ways this has inspired positive change among their colleagues and clients.

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Products & Solutions

Diamond Bank Storms the Market: A BETA Way to Save

In 2012, an estimated 64 percent of Nigerians were unbanked and had never accessed any formal financial services or products, a number that is higher for women: nearly 73 percent of all Nigerian women are unbanked. This number does not include figures for the underbanked—men and women who have had

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Gender Lens Investing

Mary Ellen Iskenderian on BSR’s Open Sustainability Matters Webinar

Investing in Women: The Role of Finance in Women’s Empowerment Date: Wednesday March 12, 2014 Time: 8-9 a.m. PST Venue: Webinar Register Now → Despite significant progress through global commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment, developed and developing countries still face significant challenges in ensuring the equal treatment of

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General

Around the Country in 11 Days: A Visit to Our Microfinance Partners in India

Last November, I had the great privilege of joining Women’s World Banking’s closest supporters on a trip to India. Our agenda was ambitious: four financial institutions; five cities; eleven days. Throughout the trip, we met the inspiring women entrepreneurs who are at the heart of every product introduction, piece of research, and leadership training led by Women’s World Banking.

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Products & Solutions

Youth Cannot Be Ignored

Youth savings specialist Ryan Newton blogs about the youth panel during the “Building Women-Focused Finance” Conference in Amman, Jordan, November 20-21, 2013.

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Products & Solutions

Microinsurance: The win-win-win value proposition

MFW is a client-centric institution that prides itself on striving to meet their clients’ needs. In the process of analyzing the life cycle of their clients, they realized that there are many circumstances where clients face health-related issues that involve many expenses and often loss of income, all of which have a negative impact on the financial stability of the household, maternity and child birth being the most common. With Women’s World Banking’s support and product development expertise, MFW set out to create a product to cover clients facing those health emergencies.

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Products & Solutions

Adding Gender to the Microfinance Bottom Line

Jaclyn Berfond, Senior Associate for Strategy at Women’s World Banking guest blogged on the Center for Financial Inclusion blog on the important of measuring a financial institution’s gender performance in order to know and track whether they are serving women well.

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Great Shot: A woman photographer builds her business in Jordan

Sameera got a loan from MFW to start her business (the first one for 1,000 dinar, approximately US$ 1,400). The beginning was especially tough, as she was the first woman to open a storefront business in the Sahab neighborhood, and the male shop owners didn’t approve of her presence. It took all her perseverance and strength to endure this harassment, but finally, she managed to gain acceptance and her business started to thrive.

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WWB News

Essay by Rosaisha Ozoria, Founder’s Scholarship Winner

Financial literacy for Hispanic women Twice a week I head down to volunteer at the Los Sures Social Services office, situated next to the local senior citizen home, to help at the food pantry. We distribute food to people in my neighborhood. Many are familiar faces. Many are middle-aged Hispanic

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Leadership & Diversity

In the Philippines, Leadership and Experience Help Clients Rebuild after Haiyan

By Maura Hart, Manager, Public Relations Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation (NWTF) was founded in time of crisis in the Philippines 29 years ago. Decades later, NWTF has seen its clients through countless typhoons (an average of 22 per year in the Philippines) and other natural disasters, experiences that proved invaluable when Typhoon Haiyan (known in the Philippines as Yolanda) hit in November.

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Research & Perspectives

Measuring Client Success: Insights from a Yogurt Shop

We were in Amman, Jordan last week supporting Women’s World Banking’s 2013 Global Forum: Building Women-Focused Finance: The Global-Local Experience. Our first day began with a visit to the Amman headquarters of Microfund for Women (MFW), a Women’s World Banking network member and our gracious local host for the week.

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WWB News

Profile of a Women’s World Banking Fellow: Liannette Perez

By Melisa Socorro-Nunez, Global Marketing and Communications Intern

Summer intern Melisa recently sat down with Liannette Perez and talked about her experience at Women’s World Banking, first as Compliance Associate, then as a Fellow. Fellows rotate through four departments of the organization over a two year period.

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WWB News

Essay by Caitly Reynoso, Founder’s Scholarship Winner

Being a junior and learning about different colleges and careers makes it hard for me to only be interested in one field, but in my eyes business is one of the few majors that will allow me to explore most of the careers that I am currently interested in. Ten

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WWB News

A Final Recap of Building Women-Focused Finance

We just concluded our Building Women-Focused Finance: The Global Experience conference in Amman and we are so excited about the quality of the presenters and the level of engagement from the audience of over 300 people from around the world. As Mary Ellen Iskenderian, our president and CEO, said in

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WWB News

Building Women-Focused Finance: a recap of day 1

We have just concluded the first day of our best practices conference in Amman, Jordan for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, “Building Women-Focused Finance: the Global-Local Experience.” The agenda was packed with fascinating panels, bringing together Women’s World Banking staff, network members and industry experts to weigh

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WWB News

Kicking off a women-focused finance conference in Amman

In less than 24 hours, Women’s World Banking will be kicking off its first conference for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in Amman, Jordan, “Building Women-Focused Finance: the Global-Local Experience.” The impetus for holding a women-focused finance conference in MENA could not be clearer: only 13% of women have a formal savings account with 4% of women accessing a loan – these numbers are the lowest in the world and if not addressed, will prevent any significant economic growth for the region.

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Research & Perspectives

“He helps me:” a note on household dynamics in rural Malawi

Women’s World Banking believes that in order to serve women well, we must understand the social, cultural and political context in which they live and the distinct financial needs that they face. And while women’s experiences and needs vary, from the Middle East to South Asia, one common finding is this: women’s work – both domestic and income-generating – is undervalued, if not completely disregarded, especially in rural communities across the world.

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Research & Perspectives

The poor in the developed world need access to financial services too

In an article that ran in the Times on October 28 (“Microcredit for Americans“), Jonathan Morduch made a bold statement, one we were glad to hear: Families in rural Africa are more like U.S. families than everyone wants to believe,” said Jonathan J. Morduch, the executive director of the Financial

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Products & Solutions

Lessons from Syria: building resilient microfinance leadership in the Middle East and North Africa

Around the end of August, the weeks leading up to the Women in Leadership program (WIL) in Jordan, my team was glued to the news watching the events unfolding in Egypt, Syria and across the Middle East. Egypt had called a state of emergency and the Syrian crisis had come to a head with reports of chemical weapons and talk of a military strike. It was precisely this regional uncertainty that made it so important for us to go forward with the Women in Leadership program in Amman in September.

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WWB News

“Women and Poverty” Ela Bhatt’s speech for the Ghandi Lecture on Nonviolence at McMaster University

Women’s World Banking board member and Self-Employed Women’s Association (India) founder Ela Bhatt recently gave the 15th annual Mahatma Ghandi Lecture on Nonviolence at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The event was held on October 3 and the title of Ela’s speech was: “Women and Poverty: The Hidden Face of Violence with Social Consent.”

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WWB News

A Benefit for Women’s Economic Empowerment

Women’s World Banking celebrated its work empowering low-income women worldwide at the IAC Building in New York City, featuring the powerhouse panel of Anne-Marie Slaughter, Melanne Verveer and John Gerzema, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

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Research & Perspectives

Beauty as Business: Research on Women Entrepreneurs in India

Thanks to television and Bollywood, Indian women have become more aware of new trends and demand an ever-expanding range of services for their hair, skin and nails from local beauty parlors. The result is that beauty parlors can be seen in almost every neighborhood and street, from low-income neighborhoods to busy streets and markets to posh suburbs.

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Research & Perspectives

Women’s World Banking highlights opportunities for Papua New Guinea Central Bank to serve women

September 23, 2013 Women’s World Banking had the privilege of participating in a collaborative workshop in Port Moresby, co-hosted by the Central Bank of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the UNCDF Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP), intended to generate ideas from a range of stakeholders to include in the strategy. This gave us a unique opportunity to utilize our research on the challenges and opportunities women face in accessing financial services in PNG to influence national policy, ensure that it includes a focus on women and to continue building our relationships with players in the Pacific region following our regional forum earlier this year.

It was heartening to see a Central Bank choosing to call together a diverse and mostly-local group of bankers, microfinance practitioners, women’s groups and representatives from savings and loan societies – alongside Women’s World Banking and the International Finance Corporation – to gather their perspectives on what the national strategy should look like. Each group presented their point of view and produced at the end of the workshop, a summary of recommendations that featured a wide range of opinions and targeting different constituencies.

We highlighted these key points from our research:

• There is an immense opportunity to serve women in PNG. Women are dramatically underserved by the financial services sector yet are just as likely as men to be earning. Women are important contributors to household. Our research showed that women need and want services to help them manage their money, including savings, loans and micro-insurance. Financial services providers should see serving women as not just a social cause but a real business opportunity.
• But women are tough customers. Winning the loyalty of PNG’s unbanked women will not be easy. Our research shows that to satisfy women, banking services need to be:
• Affordable and transparent: Women in PNG and elsewhere are unwilling to pay fees to save, such as the account maintenance fees and heavy withdrawal fees common in PNG. These fees effectively impact women more than men because they are usually poorer and have the responsibility of stretching their income to cover household expenses. Low fee, “no frills” accounts are offered by all of the PNG banks, yet there seem to be gaps in the outreach and awareness of these accounts. Most women in our study only knew about fee-based accounts.
• Secure: Women repeatedly emphasized PNG’s weak law and order environment and extremely high rates of domestic violence, which both pose serious risks for women’s physical well-being and their money if it is not locked away securely. Women also highlighted the risks of carrying money to and from their homes and businesses and said that carrying money to a bank branch may also not be safe. Mobile phone banking through neighborhood agents is therefore an attractive solution.
• Convenient: Working mothers everywhere know that they are the busiest people in the world! It’s no different in PNG. Mobile phone banking is not only great for security but offers a way to make banking much more convenient. But there is a gender gap in terms of access: PFIP found that 21% of women in urban areas do not have a phone, compared to just 9% of men. There’s also room to improve understanding and trust of mobile phone banking amongst women. GSMA found that 47% of women liked the idea but did not open a mobile money account because they didn’t understand the technology and 55% were not sure if mobile money is safe.
• Easy for illiterate customers: English is the language of the financial sector in PNG and many places, yet many women in Port Moresby (nearly 75% according to PFIP) are unable to communicate in English (a figure likely to be higher in rural and remote areas). Women’s World Banking believes in using visual and vernacular languages when creating marketing materials and forms to reduce this barrier.
The good news is that these are the features that both women and men want. If banks find ways to satisfy women through incorporating more of the features above, they will also gain men customers who have similarly been excluded from the banking sector.
Women’s World Banking shared these insights with the Central Bank, urging them to set targets to balance financial inclusion in PNG and to encourage more inclusive product design. The following inputs to the strategy were made, relating to a focus on women of the Central Bank:
• Set a target of 50% women served by the financial services sector, up from 30%, by 2015. Individual institutions should identify institutional targets for women’s financial inclusion and disaggregate gender data to track their progress.
• Lower the documentation requirements for opening an account (a barrier for women who do not have ID cards). This could include allowing women to use their affiliation with member-based groups, such as the Women’s Coffee Growers’ Association for example, as proof of identification for basic accounts.
• Work with the Ministry of Education to include financial education in the curriculum of public schools or vocational institutions, as an effort to start building financial literacy at a younger age to prepare more girls (and boys) to use financial services.
Women’s World Banking was proud to be able to contribute to and hopefully influence PNG’s national financial inclusion strategy. We’ll continue to look out for gains in women’s access in region, as we work on expanding financial inclusion for women around the world.

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Women should not have to choose lower-paying jobs

Whether in a developed country such as the United States or in the low-income neighborhoods of Colombia, women are constantly making income decisions based on a social and cultural default that they are responsible for children and the household.

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Leadership & Diversity

Celebrating one year of leadership community

In celebration of our Community’s One Year Anniversary, we asked members to share photos of themselves working with their teams and to tell us their leadership philosophies. We are now pleased to share them with you through this video!

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Products & Solutions

A guide on how to serve youth through savings accounts

All this week Women’s World Banking has been focusing on our youth savings work in honor of International Youth Day 2013. To cap it off, we’d like to share our extensive and interactive guide for deposit-taking microfinance institutions looking to offer or improve a youth savings program for their market.

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Products & Solutions

What do girls want?

In 2008, Women’s World Banking began working with XacBank in Mongolia to develop a youth savings and financial education program, with support from the Nike Foundation, as part of the Girl Effect initiative.

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Leadership & Diversity

Higher stock prices: the case for gender diversity

A new study from Thomson Reuters finds that companies with gender-diverse boards perform better than companies with zero women on their board. This echoes what the Center for Microfinance Leadership has known all along: that diverse perspectives lead to stronger decisions and healthier institutions…

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Leadership & Diversity

The case for women’s leadership: Joyce Banda

Under Joyce Banda, Malawi’s economy is recovering, with manufacturing expected to grow six percent and agriculture 5.7 percent (World Bank) and respect for democracy and human rights has returned to the country (International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute).

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Leadership & Diversity

Co-creation of a leadership learning experience

In 2013, Women’s World Banking’s Center for Microfinance Leadership (CML) was given the incredible opportunity to create a new Senior Leadership Exchange to grow its own product offering while supporting the development of women leaders in microfinance.

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WWB News

Happy Fourth of July from Women’s World Banking!

Today, the United States of America celebrates its 237th day of independence from Great Britain. While Americans all over the world reflect on the over 200 years of democratic liberty they enjoy, we at Women’s World Banking would like to encourage everyone to spend a few minutes to think about

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WWB News

Announcing our new Fellows for 2013

It is with great pleasure that I announce that Sandy Salama from network member The Lead Foundation (Egypt) has been selected as the first network representative in the Women’s World Banking Fellowship Program.

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WWB News

Brand Evolution: Women’s World Banking

I’m so excited to introduce our new logo and website today! For more than 35 years, we have been the authoritative resource for the needs of low-income women. In the evolution of our work, we are serving more women than ever before with the essential tools and resources that allow

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Research & Perspectives

What Women’s Empowerment Means to Me

What empowerment means to a woman is complex. At Women’s World Banking, we focus on economic empowerment because we know that the ability to earn an income is linked to the ability to make decisions about how household money is allocated.

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Research & Perspectives

Women are tough but loyal bank clients

Women’s World Banking is a network of 39 financial companies across 28 countries that focus solely on women. Recognising the poor access women have to credit and savings instruments, WWB works to level the playing field. Mary Ellen Iskenderian, president and CEO of WWB, talks to TOI-CREST about why women need to treated

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Products & Solutions

Helping low-income women protect their assets: microinsurance

In a recent project we worked with our network member Microfund for Women (MFW, Jordan) to launch Ri’aya (The Caregiver Policy). Ri’aya is a unique micro‐health insurance product that provides a cash benefit after hospitalization to help with costs associated with loss of business, medical expenses, transportation and other household needs.

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Products & Solutions

Financial Literacy in Cairo

Microfinance has been operating in Egypt since the 90’s; however this has not created a market of savvy borrowers. Through our market research we found that the façade of interest-free Islamic loans has created a lack of clarity around interest rates and compounded the issue of low financial literacy among men

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Products & Solutions

Saving for the Future: Youth Savings

The total global population of girls ages 10 to 24 is expected to peak in the next decade. According to market research conducted by Women’s World Banking, girls as young as 10 years old regularly accumulate money, actively manage it and want a safe place to save it. Ana Laura lives in a low-income

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Research & Perspectives

Economic Empowerment Through Access

More than 1.3 billion people globally live in poverty; the majority of them are women. The United Nations International Labour Office reports that women face substantially lower employment rates, have very little control over property and resources, are more prone to working in the informal sector with lower earnings.

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