By Marina Joseph – Art in Tanzania internship
The World Bank views financial inclusion as a means by which individuals and businesses can access valuable and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs, including transactions, payments, savings, credit, and insurance, delivered in a responsible and sustainable manner. Financial inclusion expands access to efficient financial services. Achieving inclusive growth means promoting often-overlooked groups, such as women and low-income individuals, as they disproportionately face limited access to quality financial services. Empowering such groups helps increase participation in the economy, and their standard of living improves simultaneously.
Women’s World Banking (WWB) is a global network of 39 leading microfinance institutions from 27 countries. The network members are diverse in terms of geography, size, and structure, but united in their firm belief that microfinance must remain committed to women as clients, innovators, and leaders. In 2009, WWB was asked to review proposals by the G-20 Financial Inclusion Expert Group, which they gladly did, as it acknowledged that women face different or additional barriers to accessing finance.
WWB offered nine suggestions to financial institutions interested in expanding access to finance for low-income women. The following are the suggestions.
- Time: Acknowledge constraints on women’s time and mobility
- Confidentiality: Give women the choice of who they want to be involved in financial transactions
- Product design: Accommodate all levels of literacy in product design and marketing
- Documentation and collateral requirements: Be sensitive to the fact that requirements for documentation and collateral may exclude women
- Loan size: Give women access to a range of loan sizes and structures
- Accounting for cultural norms: Tailor marketing strategies to reach women
- Branding: Create a brand position that honours women
- Institutional Culture: Ensure gender-positive interactions
- Moving beyond credit: Offer a full suite of financial products
World Bank’s empowerment sourcebook, ‘Empowerment is the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold Empowering Women through Microfinance: Evidence from Tanzania 36 accountable institutions that affect their lives’. In a developing country like Tanzania, financial inclusion for women can have a transformative impact. Tanzania’s policymakers have created an environment enabling women’s economic inclusion.
In 2006, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) mentioned that Tanzania is a country undertaking efforts to bridge that gap. The following are some of the existing and expanding policies that aim to achieve this.
Financial inclusion data disaggregated by gender
The Bank of Tanzania has expressed its intent to collect sex-disaggregated data and is in the process of expanding its financial inclusion database, collecting data similar to Findex 2014. As a country, it has developed policies based on FinScope surveys in 2006, 2009, and 2013, which provide financial inclusion data broken down by gender. A new FinScope survey is scheduled for 2016 and is expected to have an even more substantial impact on policy direction.
- Development of financial infrastructure
Tanzania has made significant progress in developing adequate payment infrastructures alongside its regulatory framework for mobile money. These infrastructures help build information based on women as clients so they can be better served.
- Women’s financial inclusion as an explicit policy objective with quantitative targets
Tanzania’s 2013 Framework prioritises poor rural households and their enterprises, including those of low-income women and youth, without specifying gender targets. Following the high-level conference on women’s financial inclusion held in Yamoussoukro in August 2015 and the 7th AFI Global Policy Forum (GPF) held in Maputo in September 2015, the Bank of Tanzania decided to introduce gender targets and indicators in the revised measurement framework, with the possibility of integrating gender issues into the Financial Inclusion National Framework itself ( Alliance for Financial Inclusion, 2016).
- Financial consumer protection regulation
The Financial Inclusion National Council recognises the importance of financial consumer protection, which has become increasingly important with the growth of digital financial services. The Bank of Tanzania considers consumer protection particularly important for women, as they are considered more vulnerable to the environment.
