{"id":5951,"date":"2019-01-08T13:22:08","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T12:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insights.invyo.io\/africa\/?p=5951"},"modified":"2019-01-14T14:43:25","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T13:43:25","slug":"fintech-for-women-scaling-the-financial-inclusion-pyramid-in-egypt-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insights.invyo.io\/africa\/industries\/neobank-baas\/fintech-for-women-scaling-the-financial-inclusion-pyramid-in-egypt-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Fintech for Women: Scaling the Financial Inclusion Pyramid in Egypt – Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fintech is often talked about as a revolution – but in Egypt it is more of a democratization. By making financial services more widely available and lowering costs and barriers to access finance, financial technology (fintech) can democratize financial services to the masses \u2013 starting with the\u00a023.2 million Egyptian women<\/a>\u00a0who remain excluded from the formal financial system.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a bid to accelerate women\u2019s financial inclusion in MENA, the region with the lowest\u00a0female economic participation in the world<\/a>, the DFID-funded Arab Women\u2019s Enterprise Fund (AWEF<\/a>) led a study to understand the scope for Digital Financial Services (DFS) in Egypt, map key constraints to women\u2019s financial inclusion and identify opportunities to transform the livelihoods of low-income Egyptian women through improved access to finance.<\/p>\n

This blog highlights the main findings of this study, by 1) setting the scene on the gender finance landscape in Egypt; 2) mapping key stakeholders in the women\u2019s financial inclusion ecosystem; 3) identifying main constraints to female access to, and control over, financial resources and, last but not least; 4) presenting AWEF\u2019s strategy to democratize financial services for poor women in Egypt.<\/p>\n

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Setting the Scene: Women\u2019s Financial and Economic Exclusion in Egypt<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Access to financial resources is widely acknowledged as a key condition to women\u2019s economic empowerment.<\/p>\n

In Egypt, women\u2019s economic and financial empowerment is\u00a0a governmental priority<\/a>\u00a0and even though female financial inclusion is on the rise, women remain disproportionately excluded from the formal financial system.\u00a0Only 27% of adult women have a financial account<\/strong>\u00a0(versus 39% for men) \u2013 a gender gap of 12 percentage points that has not only increased over the last three years but also remains considerably above the global\u00a0average for developing markets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Putting this into perspective:\u00a0Egypt now has about 23.2 million unbanked or underbanked adult women<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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Fintech is often talked about as a revolution – but in Egypt it is more of a democratization. By making financial services more widely available and lowering costs and barriers to access finance, financial technology (fintech) can democratize financial services to the masses \u2013 starting with the\u00a023.2 million Egyptian women\u00a0who remain excluded from the formal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[776,777],"tags":[235,786,782,710,522,783,785,271,241,784,588,284,512,293,270,407],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n