Too often, financial systems overlook the lived realities of women, leading to products, policies, and market structures that do not adequately serve them. In an effort to change this, Cenfri applies a gender lens across its financial inclusion and market diagnostics work.

We have developed a portfolio of related work and are interested in advancing work in three interconnected areas:

1. Surfacing women’s needs and realities to inform financial product design and regulation
2. Understanding the realities and needs of women-led enterprises
3. Improving the quality and availability of gender-disaggregated data

Area 1: Surfacing women’s needs and realities to inform financial product design and regulation  

We often see decisions and design choices being made without adequately accounting for gender-based differences, or by relying on assumptions rather than evidence. Cenfri plans to continue working on this by tackling core barriers in how financial services are designed, delivered and measured, including:

• Closing the gap between headline financial access metrics and meaningful, sustained usage, by accounting for ongoing usage barriers women face. This includes those linked to literacy, limited trust in their own abilities, income constraints, and limited financial independence.
• Anchoring financial products in how women actually make financial decisions by accounting for perceived risk, trust, and social influence, and leveraging behavioural mechanisms such as defaults and commitment features to improve uptake and outcomes.
• Ensuring that digital financial services reduce, rather than reinforce, existing exclusions by explicitly accounting for women’s constraints, coping strategies, and resilience mechanisms.

Explore our work in these themes:

• Women’s financial decision-making: We conducted a systematic review commissioned by the IDRC to assess what behavioural science reveals about women’s financial decision making across savings, credit, payments, and insurance. The research found that women respond differently to men in terms of choice architecture, commitment mechanisms, communication, and pricing, with important implications for product design. We also developed an infographic series exploring four groups of Kenyan women, their savings behaviours, and the role that the collective individualism of savings groups plays in their financial lives.
• Strengthening female resilience: Cenfri produced research on strengthening female resilience during COVID-19, focusing on vulnerable women in Kenya and Nigeria. Using data from FinScope surveys and Cenfri’s COVID-19 Tracker, the analysis highlighted the scale of the shock, women’s coping mechanisms, and key touchpoints for designing relief and recovery policies.
• Digital payment usage: As part of our work on the State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems in Africa research series (2022, 2023 & 2024) in collaboration with AfricaNenda, we managed extensive demand-side research examining digital payment usage and barriers to usage through a gender lens, and outlined how inclusive instant payment systems can overcome them. Analysis of mobile money transaction data in Rwanda has provided an opportunity to observe the uptake and usage of mobile money by Rwandan women.

Area 2: Understanding the realities and needs of women-led enterprises

Women-led enterprises are not a monolith and our work has shown that women-led enterprises remain systematically underserved by formal financial systems due to prevailing gender norms, misaligned financial products, and limited understanding of women’s business realities.

In our work on women-led MSMEs we want to address the structural and design challenges that constrain women’s economic participation, including:

• Closing gender-based gaps in access to start-up capital and formal credit.
• Designing finance that accounts for the deep interlinkages between household and business finances for women entrepreneurs and recognises the role of social networks in enabling women’s business activities.
• Linking finance with safer market access, digitalisation, and business support to unlock sustainable MSME finance outcomes.
• Moving beyond ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to women-led MSME finance to account for diverse motivations, capacity levels, activities, household roles, and other factors that shape enterprise growth pathways.

Explore our work in this area:

• Female cross-border traders in Lesotho, Mozambique and Malawi: In a study commissioned by FinMark Trust and conducted in partnership with Behave Consulting, Cenfri examined the lived realities of women engaged in informal cross-border trade between South Africa and Lesotho, Mozambique, or Malawi. The research highlighted how cross-border trade supports women’s livelihoods while simultaneously exposing them to corruption, safety risks, and high travel and transaction costs, and sheds light on their financial service usage and transaction profiles.
• Segmentation of women-led micro enterprises in Kenya, Uganda and India: Cenfri was commissioned by CGAP to support them in managing a multi-year research programme examining the financing needs of women-led micro enterprises in India, Kenya, and Uganda. Core elements of this research were:
  1. A comprehensive literature review of micro-enterprise segmentation frameworks and creation of an extensive data library.
  2. A data collection and analysis exercise with CGAP and on-the-ground research providers, assessing the financial and non-financial needs of women-led micro enterprises. The research included segment-level analysis, market sizing, and unmet credit demand estimations. The cross-country findings were synthesised in the focus note ‘’Diverse Paths: Finance for Women’s Nano and Micro Enterprises’’, and the underlying market sizing and segmentation methodology was documented in a technical guide on gender-smart market mapping for nano and micro enterprises.
  3. Additional country-level key informant interviews and analysis using the collected survey data to cluster women-led enterprises. These insights were included in the country deep-dives for India, Kenya ,and Uganda.
• Unlocking digitalisation for women-led and youth-led MSMEs in Rwanda: Under the Rwanda Digitalisation Programme, Cenfri is working with more than 30 women-and youth-led MSMEs in need of digital transformation and capacitating them to leverage digital technologies that streamline internal processes and strengthen their market presence and business competitiveness

Area 3: Gender-disaggregated data

Although gender analysis reveals important differences in usage patterns, risk exposure, and customer experience that are not visible in aggregate data, it remains underutilised by the financial sector. We seek to understand what is inhibiting more systematic collection and use of gender-disaggregated data, and work with financial service providers and regulators to address these gaps, including:

• Improving the quality and coverage of gender-disaggregated data.
• Unlocking wider analysis and use of gender data, where many providers do not yet see gender analysis as a valuable input into product design, business development or risk management. This is often compounded by weak data architecture and limited analytical capacity, resulting in gender data being collected but rarely used.
• Strengthening regulatory capacity to collect and use gender-disaggregated data.

Explore our work in this area:

• Promoting collection and usage of supply-side gender-disaggregated data in Eswatini and Lesotho: Cenfri supported the World Bank in Eswatini and Lesotho through diagnostics on how supply-side gender-disaggregated data is collected and used in the financial sector. The work informed the development a practical roadmap to strengthen S-GDD use for product design, distribution strategies, and customer-centric decision-making.
• The effects of sex-disaggregated data collection on the reach of risk finance and insurance products: In partnership with GIZ, Cenfri examined whether gaps in sex-disaggregated data affect women’s uptake and usage of risk finance and insurance products, how these gaps manifest, and what can be done to address them. Insights from desktop research and expert interviews were consolidated into a practitioner’s guide, setting out steps for integrating gender-responsive data practices across financial service providers, regulators, and development partners.
• Unlocking customer data analytics: Cenfri has done extensive work with financial service providers on their customer data, including gender-disaggregated data. Through the ongoing Rwanda Digitalisation (RED) Programme, Cenfri provides technical assistance to government and financial service providers to better harness their data. This includes clustering customer data to identify likely adopters of digital financial services and benchmarking loan book performance across MFIs. Prior to the RED programme, Cenfri extensively worked with FSPs as part of the five-year insight2impact programme, engaging directly with financial sector innovators to strengthen the use of data, including gender-disaggregated data, to advance financial inclusion.

For more information, email vera@cenfri.org.