In the global push towards inclusive and productive financial systems, empowering women entrepreneurs extends beyond a moral imperative — it’s an economic necessity. There is evidence that financial service providers that tailor products and services for women report higher customer lifetime value, despite occasionally incurring higher costs. Yet, as progress towards closing the gender finance gap continues in earnest, the lack of one critical prerequisite often impedes institutions’ ability to serve women customers effectively: the availability of internal and external data that is disaggregated by sex.

Institutions that sex-disaggregate their data gain deeper insights into any internal gender equity gaps that may prevent them from sufficiently meeting women’s needs, as well as how women interact with their services. These insights enable institutions to realign internally and adopt women-intentional approaches,  allowing them to better evaluate the impact of internal policies, algorithms, and product offerings — ultimately helping build stronger, more trusting relationships with their women customers. In the context of serving women-owned microenterprises, sex-disaggregated data (SDD) offers the following benefits:

1. Uncovering women-specific challenges: SDD reveals specific obstacles that women face in fulfilling ownership, KYC, and collateral requirements, such as difficulties in obtaining formal identification or registering businesses.
2. Tailoring solutions and processes: With SDD, financial institutions can develop processes that are specifically designed to accommodate the needs of women-led microenterprises, such as using alternative identification methods.
3. Identifying internal capabilities: SDD helps to assess workplace policies and practices, identifying opportunities for the organization to more effectively empower its teams as they work to create innovative products that meet the current and future needs of women entrepreneurs.
4. Unbiased risk profiling: SDD supports the creation of risk profiles that account for the different circumstances of women entrepreneurs and mitigate the biases that have historically excluded women from financial services.
5. Accountability and transparency: SDD allows institutions to lift the curtain on any other hidden barriers for women entrepreneurs by clearly delineating any differences in offerings, uptake, performance, and feedback based on the sex of the customer.

Fidelity Bank is a leading financial institution in Ghana, which has identified the importance of a women-intentional strategy to better meet the needs of its women customers and staff. Through support from the Coca-Cola Foundation, Accion is partnering with Fidelity Bank to enhance the resilience of women-led microenterprises through the effective use of SDD across the bank’s data value chain, a capability that Accion Advisory’s SDD toolkit is designed to assess and strengthen.

What is the sex-disaggregated data toolkit?

The toolkit assesses an institution’s processes and policies for collecting and utilizing SDD across the entire data value chain. Based on the responses collected, the toolkit categorizes an institution’s current state regarding its use of SDD, identifies gaps, helps prioritize them, and aids in developing an action plan to address these gaps.

This tool assesses an organization’s current data disaggregation policies and processes across the following dimensions:

• Institutional policies, strategies, and frameworks
• Workplace policies and practices
• Research and product design
• Data management
• Supplier engagement

Sex-disaggregated data toolkit deployment at Fidelity Bank, Ghana

The Accion Advisory team deployed the SDD toolkit to assess the sophistication of Fidelity Bank’s data disaggregation practices, identify priority workstreams to focus on, and define a roadmap of initiatives to strengthen its capabilities in this regard.

Following the assessment, we identified and worked with Fidelity Bank to implement three initiatives to help promote SDD access, usability, and adoption across the organization:

• Gender dashboards: Real-time business intelligence dashboards to monitor internal gender KPIs.
• Data request optimization: A streamlined process to fulfill SDD requests for research and business teams, enabling them to access, analyze, and incorporate customer SDD into any decision-making around women customers.
• Change management plan: A structured adoption plan to drive usage of SDD across teams and functions.

One of the first recommendations implemented was a dashboard that visualizes key gender metrics, such as women’s representation, promotion rates, and employee engagement. It is now regularly used in internal reviews, helping HR prioritize actions for the bank’s women-intentional strategy and achieve greater workplace equity. The imminent implementation of data request optimization and customer SDD adoption will allow Fidelity Bank’s research, product, and business teams to better capture and implement insights gleaned around the unique capabilities, needs, and wants of women customers when developing its products and services.

By building internal capacity to incorporate SDD, we empower institutions to design more inclusive and equitable financial solutions. While institutions benefit from improved decision-making and greater ability to realize untapped market potential from an underserved segment, women benefit from an enhanced customer experience and relevant offerings that are more likely to help them succeed.

Accion and Fidelity Bank share a vision of making women more visible across financial services. SDD is proving to be a powerful enabler in turning that vision into reality.

If you’re interested in understanding how sex-disaggregated data can improve your customer insights, product design, or internal practices, reach out to our data experts at Accion to explore how the SDD toolkit can support your institution.