Gender Data Gap: Square one.
Data driving women’s financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
A debilitating aspect to improving women’s financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa is a gender data gap. On both a national and international level, sex-disaggregated data is rare. There are datasets detailing hourly earnings, use of internet, growth rates of household expenditure, and individuals who own a mobile telephone available for this region, although figures on women and men are lumped together. A lack of clear data detailing economic metrics by gender sets back any agency aiming to improve financial inclusion — unable to determine needs and align services. This erases the discrepancies in financial inclusion that disadvantage women.
Sex-disaggregated data is a start. The challenge is to look even more granularly. To get a fuller picture, age, rural or urban location, income, ability status, race and ethnicity also need to be disaggregated.
It’s counterproductive that improving the current landscape for women focuses on better data collection and doesn’t actually provide direct financial services or apply data to drive solutions. Because of this drawback, greater impact is dependent on true collaboration between stakeholders like the UN, central banks in the private sector, and high-level governments in Sub-Saharan Africa to commit to gender equality, high-quality data collection, and opening data warehouse for analysis and use. Partnerships in the form of sharing resources across industries and regularly publishing reports is crucial to bridging the gender data and financial inclusion gap.
https://data2x.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Bridging-the-Gap-Technical-Report-Web-Ready.pdf
https://data2x.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WFID-Rwanda-Case-Study-v14-digital.pdf
