Background and Justification
Women's financial inclusion is a critical enabler of inclusive growth, poverty reduction, and sustainable development, and is directly linked to SDG 5 on gender equality and women's economic empowerment, SDG 1 on no poverty, and SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth. In West Africa, women continue to face structural barriers to accessing and using formal financial services, including restrictive social norms, weak ownership of collateralizable assets, low financial and digital literacy, identification gaps, and limited availability of affordable, gender-responsive financial products and policy instruments.
The Gambia has established an important policy and legal foundation for women's financial inclusion, including the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS 2022–2025), the Women Enterprise Fund Act 2020, the National Employment Policy, the National Youth Policy 2019–2028, and the National Development Plan. The NFIS aims to increase access to formal financial services to at least 70 per cent of adults by 2025, with an explicit emphasis on women, youth and low-income groups, and includes a dedicated gender-inclusive and youth-financing working group. Despite this strong policy framework, implementation gaps persist. Only an estimated 15 per cent of women in The Gambia access formal financial services, compared with 23 per cent of men, and approximately 77 per cent of youth remain financially excluded.
Women entrepreneurs are concentrated in informal, low-productivity activities and face multiple intersecting constraints on both the demand and supply sides. Institutional capacity for gender analysis, inter-institutional coordination, and the use of sex- and age-disaggregated data remains weak. Coordination across NFIS governance structures, gender and youth mechanisms, sector ministries and development partners is fragmented, and many initiatives remain at pilot scale rather than being institutionalised in mainstream planning, budgeting and regulatory processes.
Against this backdrop, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), through its Women and Youth Economic Empowerment Section (WYEES) of Sub-programme 6 (Gender, Poverty and Social Policy Division), is implementing the project 'Strengthening Institutional Capacities for Women's Financial Inclusion and Gender-Responsive Policy and Budgeting in Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Ghana' (June–December 2026). The project builds on the analytical and preparatory work undertaken in 2025 and the 2026 scoping missions to Sierra Leone and The Gambia, operationalising recommendations from those missions by moving from diagnostics to targeted institutional strengthening, practical tools, and capacity development.
Under Outcome 1 of the project, a Draft Technical Guidelines on Women's Financial Inclusion and Entrepreneurship in The Gambia has been prepared. The Guidelines set out practical steps for public institutions, including the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of The Gambia (CBG), the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Welfare, line ministries, and local governments, to translate high-level commitments into concrete, operational actions that expand women's access to and effective use of financial services. The Guidelines is complemented by a set of annexes with practical tools: a planner's checklist, a gender-responsive budget tagging system, scheme design templates, a core indicator menu, and mapping tools for existing initiatives.
The August 2026 mission to The Gambia will introduce the Draft Guidelines to a broad range of national stakeholders through a four-day Technical Working Group and Consultative Workshop, collect structured views and feedback on the Guidelines and complementary tools, and assess demand and existing coordination mechanisms. A fifth day will be reserved for a targeted, high-level ECA consultation with senior government officials to translate workshop findings into concrete proposals for establishing or strengthening national coordination mechanisms that link women's financial inclusion with gender-responsive budgeting and public finance processes.
Objectives
- To introduce the Draft Technical Guidelines on Women's Financial Inclusion and Entrepreneurship to national stakeholders and collect structured views to inform its adaptation and validation;
- To assess the need for the Guidelines and complementary tools (screening checklists, training materials and GRB guidance note) among national institutions;
- To review and assess existing national coordination mechanisms for women's financial inclusion, identifying opportunities for strengthening or establishing platforms, frameworks or planning circulars;
- To consult with senior government officials on the design or update of national coordination mechanisms that integrate women's financial inclusion objectives, measures and indicators with explicit links to gender-responsive budgeting and public finance processes;
- To gather evidence to support the integration of women's financial inclusion objectives, measures and indicators into national policy and planning frameworks.