Browse by Theme: Financial Inclusion

As CARE gets ready to launch its new Women’s Economic Justice strategy, we’re sharing some diverse perspectives on why women’s economic justice matters and what’s needed to achieve it. As advocates and practitioners, it’s easy for us to get bogged down in theoretical frameworks and technical jargon. So we spoke to some savings group members who work with CARE in West Africa, to find out what women’s economic justice means to them, some of the challenges they are facing, and what support they need to overcome them. Here’s what Sidonie from Benin had to say, where savings groups are referred to as FaFa Wa.

As CARE gets ready to launch its new Women’s Economic Justice strategy, we’re sharing some diverse perspectives on why women’s economic justice matters and what’s needed to achieve it. Linda Scott is an academic, a long-term partner of CARE and author of The Double X Economy. From the impact of COVID-19 to the value of unpaid care to the role of the private sector, here are some of Linda’s thoughts on why the economic potential and contribution of women cannot be ignored.

A catalytic collaboration in Vietnam is stimulating business growth for women entrepreneurs by challenging misconceptions and improving access to finance, networks and critical support services. Here we share five key principles behind successful partnership.

Microfinance organisations serve approximately 140 million low-income people around the world. And the vast majority of these are women (roughly 80%), who live in rural areas (roughly 65%) . At the end of March when the world was starting to wake up to the harsh social and economic realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant number of these institutions suddenly found themselves wondering if/how they were going to survive this global crisis.

As the climate crisis makes natural disasters a daily reality for people around the world, communities and humanitarian organisations are looking for ways to mitigate risks and build resilience. In 2019, in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai – which ravaged the coast of southern Africa – CARE’s Emergency Shelter Advisor, Crystal Whitaker, travelled to Malawi to support recovery and learn how communities were using simple savings groups to break the devastating cycle where repeat floods would wipe out homes and livelihoods, forcing families to start over again and again. Below she shares seven lessons for practitioners looking to build longer-term risk mitigation measures into shorter emergency or preparedness programmes.

“Other young people discouraged me from joining the savings group, because this was not our culture. My peers laughed at me. But I was strong and I knew what I wanted, so I joined anyway.” These are the words of Emelenziana, a young woman in Tanzania. Since CARE launched the Ishaka programme in Burundi in 2009, we’ve been working specifically with young people through our Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) approach to support women – starting with savings – to transform their world. Here’s a sample of some of the impacts we’ve seen with VSLAs for young people.

We can’t achieve women’s financial inclusion without considering harmful social norms and trying to change them. This was the key message I shared during the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s (SDC) annual Savings and Credit Forum in Bern earlier this month. The forum’s theme was ‘how to reach 1 billion women’ and I was there on behalf of CARE International UK and the CGAP Women’s Financial Inclusion Community of Practice to speak about how gendered social norms create barriers to women’s financial inclusion, and how to change them.