Investments into financial services can unlock access to opportunities and enhance resiliency in the face of financial crises. Many of these financial services can be used to enhance gender equality in a number of ways. This brief finds that financial inclusion investments with strong client protection mechanisms in place generate both intended and unintended gender-lens impacts and highlights emerging opportunities to leverage financial inclusion investments to advance gender equality.
This brief features investment-level, annualized impact performance data contributed by investors to the IRIS+ financial inclusion impact performance benchmark to explore how investments in financial services are achieving impact results for women. The financial inclusion impact performance benchmark is a new, first-of-its-kind tool that enables investors to analyze their impact performance, and to compare their own impact results relative to their peers across the market and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Find more insights on the impact performance of investments in financial inclusion, sample characteristics, and methodological choices in the financial inclusion impact performance benchmark by signing in to IRIS+ here >
Download the GIINsight, “Enhancing gender equality through financial inclusion” below:
