Global Gender Equity Requires Access to the Online Economy. Who’s Backing Digital Financial Inclusio

Many forces perpetuate the global economic gender gap and hold women back from economic progress, despite the fact that women’s entrepreneurship is growing around the world. The World Bank estimates that there are more than 6 million women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries, and that nearly 20% of working-age women own their own businesses.

One factor is that women’s work trends toward the informal. Upward of 30% of women in the nonagricultural workforce are self-employed in informal businesses; in Africa, that number rises to 63%. They are more likely to operate at home, and engage in small-scale entrepreneurship in traditional sectors like retail and service. But size aside, the income they generate helps meet critical household needs while creating long-term economic self-sufficiency.

Part of the solution to achieving equity, then, centers on lifting barriers to the tools that allow small-scale businesses to thrive in the larger, increasingly digital economy. Recently, a new philanthropic coalition has quietly formed around the issues of digital equity — with an emphasis on accessing digital financial services, tools and technology.

The effort was one of many philanthropic and programmatic developments to emerge from the recent 77th Session of the U.N. General Assembly. Supporters include global philanthropies across borders and perspectives, including the U.S.-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Aliko Dangote Foundation, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest funder for economic empowerment. The push has also drawn the advocacy of empowerment leaders like the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, which adopted the cause as a central issue.

As global leaders worked to marshal a new era of digital cooperation during the UNGA session, here’s how philanthropy united around a Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion Advocacy Hub — and sparked a movement seeking digital parity for women.

The big picture

During UNGA week, one of several core topics discussed was the role digital cooperation can play in achieving a more equitable world, leading governments, NGOs, and the private sector to pool a total of $295 million to advance digital inclusivity at a public infrastructure level.

Gender equity work centered on a Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion (WDFI) Advocacy Hub that was launched several months earlier, in July, by Women’s World Banking (WWB) and the U.N. Community Development Fund. The hub seeks to connect and amplify local coalitions, grounded in the idea that supporting “small and micro” female entrepreneurs is one of the fastest ways to drive inclusive growth, while acknowledging the lack of digital access as a root cause of their systematic separation from the economic mainstream.

The WDFI Advocacy Hub boosts innovations that help women entrepreneurs operate at scale through five central goals: providing women micro-entrepreneurs with the ability to get online and grow their digital footprints; helping them gain the digital and financial skills they need to make safe and informed financial services decisions; assuring access to women-centric digital financial services including payments, digital credit, savings and insurance; and growing data collection on their work to ensure they’re seen and understood at the local and global levels. The fifth goal is a long-term commitment to creating and growing sustainable local markets by fast-tracking digital financial engagement.

Global and local support

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $200 million to the big-picture goal of expanding global digital public infrastructure through tools like payment and data-sharing systems, and digital ID. That commitment is just one of many that came from Gates during UNGA week, but Gates acknowledged in the announcement that there isn’t “a single sustainable development goal (SDG) that digital public infrastructure won’t advance in one way or another. It is amazing in international development when one targeted investment can have spillover effects in almost every issue area we care about.”

Gates also committed another $5.5 million specifically to the hub. Deon Woods Bell, senior advisor for Global Policy and Financial Services for the Poor at the Gates Foundation, said she takes two approaches to leading the portfolio — global and local. She spent some of her time during UNGA focusing on national support, encouraging leaders to keep women in the frame when it came to digital financial services. But success, she said, lies with the ability to reach local communities. She also applies learned experience to her work. Thoughts of every woman in her life run through the way she manages programs, including understanding the pressures on working women, and a disabled family member that reminded her of all the ways that programming must be inclusive.

Global challenges like government structures and cultural norms, Woods Bell thinks, can be changed incrementally, through digital investments in measures like a simple cell phone network that empowers women to connect to the digital world from their own local communities, and form new communities of their own.

That view is shared by a partner in the movement and the hub, the Aliko Dangote Foundation — which was incorporated in 1994 by businessman Aliko Dangote, the “Bill Gates of Africa” — and is the only foundation on the continent that Gates funds as a partner.

The largest private charitable foundation in Africa, ADF works to advance social change through strategic investments that improve health and wellbeing, promote quality education, and broaden economic empowerment opportunities. Its economic work grew organically, according to CEO and Managing Director Zouera Youssoufou, who said funding priorities followed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “First came safety and security — health. Once you survive,” she said, “then you can learn and join the economic sphere.”

As sub-Saharan Africa’s largest funder for economic empowerment, ADF is actively involved in expanding access for women to financial digital services. Youssoufou spoke of a microloan program that also makes cell phones the basis of digital empowerment. Phones are loaded with a SIM card and $100 that is typically “cashed” at local shops, with only one directive: “to do good.” Check-ins at three, six and 12 months showed that women used 85% of funds productively, prompting an expansion to roughly 10% more of Nigeria’s 774 LGAs, or local government areas.

To date, 35 organizations from around the world have joined the hub, and local coalitions have launched in Ethiopia and Indonesia. As it builds, the partners hope that amplifying each others’ actions and voices will help restructure the global economy to work for all, and help women fully realize their economic potential — locally and globally.

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