Women and Money: Gender transformative approaches to Digital Financial Services

The “Women and Money” programme, implemented by IDEO.org, has begun to answer “the how” of introducing Digital Financial Services (DFS) into the lives of women: how to build trust with them; how to encourage their access to digital financial services; and how accounts and payments can have a positive impact on their lives. 

Over two years, Kore Global worked with IDEO.org (with support from the Gates Foundation) to build a breadth of solutions that enable low income women in Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and India  to access, use and benefit from DFS. Kore Global provided gender and inclusion focused research and design expertise, enabling IDEO.org to infuse gender transformative thinking in IDEO.org’s human-centred design approach. 

We first supported this aim by assessing IDEO.org’s current systems and processes, identifying good practice to build on, opportunities for further stretch, and distinct risks and challenges to address. This assessment laid the foundation for the co-creation of a bespoke approach that applied the most up-to-date global perspectives on gender and empowerment to IDEO.org’s “starting point” and supported them to be even more gender transformative in the solutions they created. The first stage of our work with IDEO.org is featured in the Women and Money Report.

In the second year of our collaboration with the programme, the Kore Global team provided advisory design support to DFS programme pilots to be implemented in Bangladesh (savings), Indonesia and Kenya (mobile money). We worked closely with design and country teams to develop relevant and gender transformative solutions. The team also advised on the design of learning and monitoring tools, to ensure a strong focus on understanding what works for women.