With New Digital Tools, Millions of Women Entrpeneurs Are Building Resilience

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 7, 2023 / The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth

Foto: Accesswire

By Michael Schlein and Shamina Singh

After many years of little progress, we're finally narrowing the gender gap in financial account ownership. According to the most recent Findex, the gap narrowed from 9 percent to 6 percent across developing economies as more women gained access to financial tools.

But a large portion of that progress was due to one country: India. If you remove India's progress, much of the developing world has a double-digit gender gap, and globally women are still more likely than men to be unbanked. About 740 million women-13 percent of all adults globally and 54 percent of the unbanked-don't have a financial account. We need to do a better job.

Today, women continue to deal with discrimination and restrictive social norms, making it much harder for them to access capital, skills and resources. Rising prices, disrupted supply chains and increasing demand for digital services are adding new challenges.

These barriers help explain why women entrepreneurs faced the most severe effects of the global pandemic, including higher rates of business closure and lower profit levels. Digital tools can make it easier to adapt and recover, but digital uptake among women small business owners was alarmingly slow and sporadic, and even declined during the pandemic. The longer they remain in a cash world, the longer they remain invisible to the financial system.

Investing in the digitization of small businesses, especially those owned by women, will enable them to survive an economic downturn and continue providing jobs, goods and services to billions of people globally. And connecting more women-led small businesses to digital financial tools can help them build resilience, boost their incomes and better serve their communities.

Now, after an exciting global project focused on tackling this very challenge, we have new evidence that backs this up.

Opening doors to the digital economy - and financial health

For the past four years, Accion and Mastercard have worked with nine financial service providers and 50 fintech startups around the world to help more micro and small businesses go digital. By working with financial companies with deep ties to their communities, we developed digital products and capabilities that meet the needs of underserved entrepreneurs-and help them participate in the digital economy.

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