Proven Solutions for Closing the Gender Digital Divide in the Digital Economy

Fiw Topics

Inclusive Digital Economies
Women's Financial Inclusion

Fiw Year

2024

Transcripts:

English

SPanish

French

Summary + Key Insights

The discussion highlights proven solutions for closing the gender digital divide, emphasizing collaboration and addressing multiple barriers simultaneously.

🤔 Importance of Gender Norms: Understanding and addressing gender norms is critical for designing inclusive financial services. Solutions must consider societal expectations to ensure women’s participation.

🔄 Integrated Solutions: Tackling multiple barriers simultaneously—access, affordability, and skills—leads to more effective outcomes in closing the gender digital divide.

🔍 Role of Public Sector: Strong public sector leadership can create the foundational support needed for private sector innovations to flourish, driving systemic change.

👩‍🏫 Learning from Peers: Programs that facilitate peer learning among women, such as savings groups, can enhance digital skills and confidence effectively.

📈 Need for Scale: While many initiatives show promise, the challenge remains in scaling successful models to reach a broader audience and create lasting impact.

🌐 Technology as an Enabler: Leveraging technology, such as mobile payment systems, can provide women with greater financial access and opportunities in the digital economy.

💡 Continuous Research: Ongoing research and data collection are essential to adapt strategies and understand the evolving barriers and solutions for women’s digital engagement.

This session summary was AI-generated using NoteGPT.

A panel discussion will share the barriers to closing the gender digital divide in the digital economy and share examples of proven solutions to do so as well as relevant resources.

Persistent gender digital inequalities have profound significance on women’s livelihoods, economic resilience and outcomes. Left unaddressed, these inequalities will worsen, especially as digital technologies continue to evolve.

The development community has been working on closing the gender digital divide for over 15 years. Solutions to close the gender digital divide do exist and have been demonstrated to show promise or be capable of adaptation and replication for scale. And yet, despite donors and other stakeholders (e.g., firms, advocacy groups) often being generally aware of and interested in the underlying issues and these promising solutions, momentum and collective action on these solutions is held back for a variety of reasons.

Sharing them in a digestible way has been difficult, often resulting in inefficient use of funds and time. This panel will talk about what we know has worked, where to find relevant resources in order to more effectively and efficiently close the gender digital divide.

Session Speakers

Diana Boncheva Gooley

Senior Advisor, Digital Finance USAID

Diana provides strategic guidance to USAID bureaus and missions on program development. She also manages programs focused, for example, on access to digital technology, digital finance and skills, Fintech ecosystem development and refugee economic security. She is an activity manager for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund. Previous to joining USAID, Diana led Women’s World Banking’s Digital Financial Services (DFS) strategic advisory engagements. In this role, she worked with banks, mobile money providers and fintechs to help them improve services to low-income women around the world. Diana also worked in management consulting at Mondato, specializing in digital finance and mobile fintech, where she headed Strategic Partnerships and Projects. She also launched and managed mobile parking, ticketing and debt collection projects for paythru, a Fintech startup in the UK. Diana has an MA from SAIS Johns Hopkins and BA from Sweet Briar College.

Christian Pennotti

Managing Director, Women in the Digital Economy Fund (WiDEF), CARE

Christian is a seasoned leader with a 20-year track record working to advance economic, financial and digital inclusion. He currently serves as the Managing Director for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund, a $60M joint initiative of USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed to meaningfully closing the gender digital divide. He also serves as Sr Director for Digital Inclusion, supporting CARE’s work in over 100 countries to advance meaningful digital inclusion for all. Christian previously led CARE’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment portfolios and played key roles in advancing entrepreneurship and food security. Outside of CARE, Christian has worked with a number of companies, non-profit organization and social enterprises supporting financial and economic inclusion. He holds a Master’s in International Development from George Washington University and a Bachelor’s from Boston College.

Gayatri Vikram Murthy

Senior Financial Sector Specialist, CGAP

Gayatri Murthy is CGAP’s Gender Lead and directs CGAP’s work on building country-level approaches to improving women’s financial inclusion. Previously she led work on platform worker livelihoods and inclusive fintech. Her work has focused on improving research methods to better understand the lives of low-income people, so that emerging insights better transform policy, private sector and funding. She also specializes in training financial institutions to build customer-centric business models and has trained staff of financial institutions in workshops around the world, including at trainings organized by the Boulder Institute for Microfinance, the Social Performance Task Force, and the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance. Before joining CGAP, Gayatri worked for 6 years in market research, including leading nationally representative surveys, impact evaluations, and qualitative studies on financial inclusion, education and civil society building, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. She began her career at GiveIndia, a platform to promote efficient and effective giving in India. Gayatri has a Master’s degree in International Communication from the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C.

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