Categories
Democratizing Innovation to Spur Growth (2025)
Innovation fuels economic growth by generating new businesses and jobs, but today's innovators mostly come from a narrow demographic, resulting in many “lost Einsteins” and “lost Marie Curies.” In thi...
The Global Gender Gap in Innovation and Creativity (2023)
This global analysis of international patent applications from 1999 to 2020 shows that women were involved in 23% of filings and only 13% of listed inventors. While the number of women inventors has s...
Her FinTech Edge – Market Insights for Inclusive Growth (202...
Digital financial services (DFS) have been considered a game changer for women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment. Despite the potential of DFS, barriers to access and adopt DFS persist. F...
Understanding Women Micro-entrepreneurs’ Use of Mobile Phone...
This report focuses on women’s use of mobile phones for business and the mobile gender gaps experienced by women micro-entrepreneurs. Even when women micro-entrepreneurs own a mobile phone, they may n...
Fintech, Female Employment, and Gender Inequality (2022)
Using data from 114 economies around the world (including Nepal, Pakistan, and India), researchers from the International Monetary Fund show that financial technologies (Fintech) can reduce gender ine...
Helping Female Entrepreneurs Access Digital Platforms: The I...
This brief from the World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab’s “Innovations in Financing Women Entrepreneurs Initiative” shares lessons from a digital mentoring program that targeted female entrepreneu...
The Impact of Digital Credit in Low-Income Countries
Digital credit allows borrowers without formal credit histories to access small, short-term loans remotely and automatically. While this offers the potential for millions of unbanked individuals to ac...
South Asia’s Path to Resilient Growth (2022)
Chapter five of this edited volume, Improving Gender Equality with Digitalization, attempts to find empirical relationships between digitalization and gender outcomes, particularly as it relates to th...
Is Fintech Always Inclusive? (2022)
Using cross-country Fintech data, the IMF examined people unintentionally left behind by digitalization. The results suggest that greater use of Fintech is associated with narrowing class and rural di...
Bangladesh’s Women Rise to the Challenge with Big Ideas for ...
Digital gender disparities are pervasive in Bangladesh. Women make up only 14% of professionals in STEM fields, despite more women than men graduating from secondary and higher secondary schools. Howe...
Empowering Women through a #DigitALL Nepal (2023)
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the use of digital payments in Nepal – benefitting countless small vendors, including Nabina Yadav, a vegetable seller in Kathmandu who was quick to switch to a messa...
Digital Freedom Out of Reach for Most Afghan Women (2023)
Only 6% of Afghan women have access to the internet through any device. In a country where the government has been overtly hostile to women going to school and college, online courses offer hope to so...