Finanzas para todas: Applying a gender lens to financial education in Colombia
Governments and aid agencies often focus efforts on improving access to finance, however, access to financial products does not guarantee that people know how to use them wisely. It’s as important to ensure that people can develop healthy and sustainable financial habits and behaviors that cement a better quality of life. In Colombia, USAID INVEST and partners developed a new digital tool to guide financial service providers in designing and delivering financial education using a gender-smart and intersectional approach.
By Natalie Alm, Strategic Communications Advisor, USAID INVEST
Colombia has made great strides in financial inclusion, with the percentage of adults that have at least one formal financial product increasing from 67% to over 90% in the last decade. However, significant gaps persist, with women, rural populations, and young people lagging significantly behind.
What’s more, access to financial products does not guarantee that people know how to use them wisely. Beyond providing financial services, it’s also important to ensure that people can develop healthy, sustainable financial habits and behaviors and cement a better quality of life.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is working to increase women’s access to capital and foster a more inclusive financial system for women in Colombia. With support from USAID’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment and the Exploratory Programs and Innovation Competitions team and USAID Colombia, through the INVEST initiative, USAID has focused on designing and providing financial products tailored to meet the specific needs of women entrepreneurs, while offering complementary services in financial education and business-related skills.
Jessica Olivan, Senior Investment Advisor with INVEST, explains, “Governments are often very focused on access to finance. But while women entrepreneurs have increasing access to loans and credit, they often still lack solid financial habits to go along with them. USAID and our partners realized that even though financial service providers were providing some support in financial education, there was a mismatch between the education provided and the practically non-existent habits of the women receiving the loans. We needed to find out what would actually move the needle in allowing women to use financial products more mindfully.”
In 2024, USAID engaged financial services provider Microempresas de Colombia and academic institution Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) to study the specific needs and barriers for women and women entrepreneurs in accessing financial education, considering intersectional factors such as age, race, geography, and income. Based on these findings, the partners then developed an interactive and open-source digital tool to guide financial service providers in designing and delivering financial education using a gender-smart and intersectional approach.
What does that mean? “Gender-smart” refers to integrating a gender analysis into a process or approach. And, explains UPB Rector Diego Alonso Marulanda Diaz, “an intersectional approach involves understanding and addressing the way in which multiple factors of identity and oppression intersect and affect the lives of vulnerable women. It recognizes that experiences of discrimination and disadvantage cannot be fully understood through one single dimension of identity, such as gender.”
The study
Microempresas and UPB focused their work on the Antioquia region of Colombia, known as a “mini-Colombia” due to its diverse geography and demographics that reflect the country as a whole, including a focus on rural areas. The partners designed a study that combined qualitative and quantitative methods, ultimately conducting surveys with over 5,000 women in 28 municipalities, as well as interviews with several key financial service providers.
As Olivan notes, “Even when there’s a desire or a mandate to provide financial education alongside the financing itself, financial service providers need more guidance when it comes to content to provide, channels to use, considerations for specific sub-populations of women, and more.”
To that end, the study paid particular attention to include entrepreneur, rural, Afro-Colombian, indigenous, and migrant women, with 90% of those surveyed living in poverty. The partners found that only 13% had received financial education or training in the last year, principally due to lack of time and familial or domestic responsibilities. The women shared that when making financial decisions, they primarily rely on their own past experience or the advice of friends and family, with only 4% stating that they reference information from financial entities.
“One of our most surprising findings was that while 64% of those surveyed say they have written financial plans, 94% have not actually improved their financial situation,” says UPB’s Marulanda Díaz. “This indicates that there is a will to take ownership of their financial management, but that the women don’t have the necessary education to get there. This means there are great opportunities to provide these groups with the tools they need for development and improvement.”
Based on the surveys, Microempresas and UPB identified best practices and recommendations for financial service providers providing financial education — from determining the appropriate format and timeline for trainings and accounting for a lack of connectivity for virtual offerings, to providing trainings at appropriate levels for the target audience and ensuring an intersectional approach.
The tool
Next, the partners used the survey results to develop the “Finanzas para todas” tool, an interactive guide for financial service providers to improve the effectiveness of financial education programs. “We like to call it ‘women-centered design,’” says Olivan.
The tool relies on the robust research techniques used by the project’s partners and allows the user to select among specific socioeconomic, cultural, and demographic variables to tailor the experience so it’s most useful to them. “The tool is important because it recognizes the diverse financial needs and challenges of different groups, especially women from racial minorities or rural areas, those with low incomes, and victims of conflict,” says Microempresas CEO Patricia Pérez Guerra. “By promoting equity and offering personalized resources, this intersectional tool will improve individual financial management and contribute to a more just and equal society.”
When entering the site, users are prompted to select the organization they belong to: a bank, cooperative, NGO, fintech, etc. The tool then walks the user through six modules, including recommendations for use of the tool, an overview of the intersectional approach, research findings, profiles of eight different types of women clients with different socioeconomic demographics, training methodologies, and resources on measuring the effectiveness and impact of the program.
“USAID’s support not only provided funding and logistical resources for us to develop the tool,” says Pérez Guerra, “but it also encouraged interaction with other organizations and entities, collaborating in data collection, getting valuable feedback, and ensuring that the tool will actually be used in the target communities.
Looking forward
Microempresas and UPB officially launched the tool this past June. UPB reports the response has been positive so far, particularly the way the platform highlights the different profiles of women, and welcomes further user feedback. For their part, Microempresas looks forward to using lessons learned in developing the tool in improving its own training — ensuring that the content is relevant, adapting the delivery method to the women participating, and even increasing the use of digital tools to facilitate interaction among participants.
The team is also focused on spreading the word among the financial services community. “Our hope,” says Olivan, “is that beyond broad use of this innovative new tool, other organizations might be inspired to expand and scale it or make it bigger and better.”
Access the “Finanzas para todas” tool: https://finanzasparatodas.microempresas.co/
