USAID CATALYZE Finance for Resilience (F4R) uses blended finance, mostly in the form of incentives to financial sector actors, to expand access to credit for underserved communities in Burkina Faso and Niger. This learning brief features insights from a key aspect of F4R’s work: collaborating with a network of financial institutions (FIs) and financial facilitators (FFs) to increase lending for women-owned micro-, small-, and medium-sized businesses (W-MSMEs). While F4R has seen early success using a Pay-for-Results (P4R) approach, closing the financial inclusion gender gap remains complex. For a variety of structural reasons, women’s economic activities are, on average, smaller than those of men. The financing gender gap remains complex because of the reluctance of women to ask for larger amounts of credit and the challenges of women having valuable collaterals, exacerbated by the lack of land ownership by women. This brief will highlight how the inclusion gap can be decreased through addressing the disparity in loan size, among other lessons from F4R’s work with financial ecosystem actors in Burkina Faso and Niger.
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