Developing a Gender Mainstreaming Accelerator Programme in Ghana

Context

In Ghana, the last decade has seen major improvements to increasing women’s financial inclusion. According to the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, formal account ownership has more than doubled, of which women’s account ownership now stands at 63% (previously 27%). However, the gender gap has doubled – moving from 6% to 11%. Interested to use more digital financial services, women in Ghana still face barriers to the formal financial system, lacking targeted products suitable for their businesses.

Committed to improving access to finance for women in Ghana, the Development Bank Ghana (DBG) has signed up to the UN Women’s Economic Empowerment Principles and has recently been accepted as the 100th member of 2X Global. As part of DBG’s gender mainstreaming strategy and roadmap, it intends to step up its effort to achieve SDG 5 – Gender Equality.

Objective

The ICR Facility will provide expertise and technical assistance to DBG to improve the gender mainstreaming and gender-lens investing progress to ultimately better serve women clients in Ghana and create a gender-sensitive financial ecosystem. This will be done by developing a Gender Mainstreaming Accelerator Programme (GMAP), a training-of-trainers capacity building program for DBG and its partners.

The intervention will move through four phases:

Conducting a gender finance mainstreaming scan of DBG and its stakeholder environment, including an analysis of the policy framework that supports gender finance in Ghana, to capture the current status and remaining gaps in gender finance mainstreaming,
Recommending policy changes to improve the financing framework for women,
Developing the GMAP concept and creating suitable training materials that are based on the results of the scan and conducting capacity building training sessions,
Setting up a monitoring & evaluation concept that will support DBG to effectively monitor the gender mainstreaming progress in its partners and integrating this into DBG’s framework.

Overall, this ICR Facility intervention should provide DBG with the tools, expertise, and competences to advance gender equality in the Ghanaian financial services industry and engage better with its partners.

Results

The Gender Mainstreaming Accelerator Program improved the business environment in Ghana by fostering inclusivity and equality within the finance sector. The program fostered a collaborative environment, enabling stakeholders, both women and men, to engage in a conversation about gender equality and women’s financial empowerment. This inclusive approach brought forth a variety of perspectives and solutions, making everyone feel a part of the change. Moreover, the program’s focus on gender training expanded the internal capacity to leverage a wider range of skills and expertise with PFIs in particular. In addition, stakeholder engagement resulted in the development of policy recommendations for women’s financial empowerment in Ghana.