Is Kenya’s financial sector serving women?

Many argue that women are the backbone of the economy. However, despite Kenya’s reducing gender gap, women remain largely informal and still under-served by the financial sector.
In his presentation on the gender gap, Josea Kiplangat, Kenya Bankers Association, finds that mobile phone ownership is a significant driver of financial inclusion for women, but social capital is a significant driver of women’s financial health- does this point to new opportunities for digitisation and mutual finance? Sibel Kusimba, University of South Florida, and her colleague Naomy Wanga find that women in chama’s are over twice as likely to be financially healthy as those who are not, arguing that Kenya’s chamas have not received the attention they deserve if we want to improve the outcomes of financial inclusion, especially for women. Finally, Luis Trevino, Alliance for Financial Inclusion, points to blind spots in our data universe, arguing for the importance of sex-disaggregated data to support financial inclusion for women.
FSD Kenya’s CEO, Tamara Cook, leads an engaging panel discussion on women, chamas and finance with Mwangi Githaiga, CEO of Kenya Women Micro-Finance Bank (KWFT), Rosemary Bowen, Head of Social Statistics at KNBS and Radha Upadhyaya from the University of Nairobi.