Promoting gender-sensitive digital financial services, policies and regulations across ECOWAS

With the overall goal to achieve a harmonised gender-centric digital financial inclusion framework for use by the digital financial inclusion (DFI) ecosystem stakeholders across the ECOWAS countries, this initiative will focus on the Regional Payments Framework Gateway as a strategic entry for the conduct of the gender gap analysis. The framework has  five key components:

• Strengthen financial inclusion strategy across ECOWAS by taking stock of any progress in women’s financial inclusion initiatives in the region, identifying gaps and opportunities and using insights for development of the regional financial inclusion strategy.
• Inform data analytics framework and strategy design using gender gap analysis to determine gender identifiers for gender disaggregated data and explore use of data analytics for behavioural insights on how women access and use digital financial services.
• Review and address policy barriers that hinder women from accessing DFS such as agency banking, micro loans, savings and insurance.
• Review policies aimed at promoting digital identities (IDs) to help address challenges that prevent women from accessing ID, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and investment opportunities.
• Explore how digital payments are being addressed and the opportunity for enforcing gender identifiers to provide a consolidated view of how both men and women use financial services.