Financial inclusion is crucial to achieving gender equality. Empowering women with knowledge and control over their finances opens opportunities to start saving, build businesses, and gain economic independence. However, this path to independence remains a challenge for women entrepreneurs. The World Bank states that women-owned micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) face a credit gap of $260 to $320 billion annually despite representing 30 to 37 percent of all MSMEs in emerging markets.
If women had the same access to financial products as men, the impact would be profound — not just for women, but for the entire economy. Women are currently less likely to be approved for retail credit, funding to start and grow businesses, and adequate insurance coverage. These disparities represent significant missed opportunities for financial institutions that can be quantified into billions of dollars, as reported by Oliver Wyman.
The UN’s theme for International Women’s Day is “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment,” calling for action to unlock equal rights, power, and opportunities for all. Accion is committed to unlocking economic opportunities for women as we partner with key stakeholders around the world to address critical barriers to women’s financial inclusion. The Accion Advisory team works closely with financial service providers, technology companies, and other financial ecosystem players to realize and respond to the opportunity that intentionally serving women presents.
The struggle to achieve gender intentionality
Many financial providers still struggle to meet women’s unique product and service needs adequately. Based on our experience, they are constrained by:
- Limited resources and data: Many do not have the capacity to fully analyze the market opportunity that serving women presents.
- Low motivation for change: Some organizations are complacent, with the mindset that their current operations are “good enough.”
- Lack of internal capacity: Many are unprepared to rethink internal processes, product development, and engagement strategies using a gender lens.
- Weak incentives: Without regulatory pressure, investor requirements, or donor mandates, there is little motivation to embed gender intentionality into operations.
- No sex-disaggregated data: In the absence of sex-disaggregated data reporting mandates, it is difficult to identify gaps, track progress, or tailor financial products to women effectively.
- Competing priorities: Gender-intentional initiatives are often deprioritized or seen as “nice-to-have” rather than essential.
For organizations that want to improve how they serve women but don’t know where to begin or how to structure their efforts, understanding gender intentionality and what it takes to achieve it can make a meaningful difference.
Gender intentionality is more than just designing products
When an organization chooses to serve women, it needs to foster a sustainably inclusive culture. Gender intentionality is not just about launching a credit product for women. It’s about a commitment to equality at every level — organizational, operational, and societal.
This means ensuring that:
- The organization provides equal opportunities for women employees across hiring, development, and leadership.
- The company’s value propositions and customer practices avoid unintended gender biases or exclusions.
- The ultimate goal is to contribute to equality not only within the business but also in the broader community.
Gender strategy as a vital pillar for success
To help guide organizations toward a women-driven model, Accion Advisory created a proprietary tool to assess an organization’s level of gender intentionality and support them on closing the gaps to advance towards a transformative organization. To determine its current level, the tool analyzes an organization’s internal practices and policies related to female staff and the intentionality of its business model, from how it designs and implements its products and services to how it promotes and engages with customers. The graphic below illustrates how the tool is structured across four progressive levels, from ‘business as usual’ to ‘transformative.’ These levels are assessed across five critical categories, offering a holistic evaluation of gender intentionality.
The assessment framework
What makes the tool unique is its dual focus on internal and external gender practices, ensuring that the changes implemented are sustainable and impactful. Addressing both dimensions provides a complete and accurate picture of the organization’s current state of gender inclusivity and equity. This approach enables organizations to chart a clear and effective path toward cultural transformation, promoting continuous improvement in all areas related to gender equity.
We can also identify areas for improvement. The assessment establishes a baseline for tracking progress over time, enabling organizations to monitor the effectiveness of their interventions. The detailed report generated includes strategic insights and actionable recommendations that our teams help to implement. This helps organizations navigate their unique journeys toward gender intentionality with confidence in areas like product design, risk score models, sex-disaggregated data strategies, women-centered capacity-building programs, and inclusive segmentation models, among others.
Moving beyond business as usual
We are incorporating our assessment tool into our work to support our partners on their gender intentionality journeys and ensure the solutions we develop make it easier for women to access and use financial services. Among these engagements is a new program to help close the financing gap for women. We are working with partners in Bangladesh, Ghana, India, and Mexico on solutions that include creating a digital profile for women without a formal financial history, scaling a climate resilience fund, researching gender and social norms, and designing programs for young women.
At Accion, we believe that moving beyond business as usual is not just an aspiration — it’s a necessity. By integrating gender intentionality into every aspect of their operations, organizations can unlock new opportunities for growth, innovation, and community impact. Our transformative model is designed to facilitate this transition, helping institutions build a more inclusive future for all.
Explore More
Get in touch
Contact Accion Advisory
We work to transform the lives of underserved people and small businesses around the world through digitally enabled products and services that improve financial health and resilience. If you share this vision, let us know how we can work together.