Are savings interventions a path to women’s economic empowerment?

Financial inclusion has been a key feature of women’s economic empowerment programs

Financial inclusion is a significant focus of programs supported by governments, private donors and the financial services industry:

“For the World Bank Group, financial inclusion represents a core topic, given its implications for reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. [This] reflects a growing realization of its potentially transformative power to accelerate development gains.” 

(Jim Yong Kim, World Bank Group President)

Most services provided under the umbrella of financial inclusion are credit and savings products. Savings products, such as savings accounts, in particular are believed to have fewer risks than other financial products such as loans. New modalities of financial inclusion are also rapidly evolving, for example there is an increased focus on digital delivery of financial services, and new approaches are being developed for conceptualizing and measuring women’s economic empowerment.

Synthesizing the evidence

Numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been conducted to better understand the role financial inclusion plays in the lives of the poor living in low- and middle-income countries. We conducted a meta-regression analysis to synthesize the evidence on the impact of credit and savings interventions on women’s economic empowerment and agency and, how the impacts varied based on enablers and barriers related to intervention and evaluation designs, target groups and context.  

 Experimental evidence from 18 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) was included in this synthesis; these studies were mostly categorized as high-risk of bias studies with high levels of heterogeneity across intervention types and outcomes.

Impact of credit and savings interventions on women’s economic empowerment

Financial inclusion is presently one of the most widely recognized areas of activity in international development. It refers to efforts to the delivery of affordable financial services such as payments, savings, credit and insurance to poor people, particularly women, in a responsible and sustainable way. The expectation underlying financial inclusion is that greater access to financial services will create poverty-alleviating and empowering effects, ultimately transforming lives.

An abundance of meta-studies in the form of systematic reviews, meta-analyses and systematic reviews have been conducted to better understand the role financial inclusion plays in the lives of the poor living in low- and middle-income countries. The evidence base is heterogenous suggesting that the effects of financial inclusion on women’s economic empowerment are small and highly dependent on certain programmatic features. The key enablers seem to be group interactions, improved mobility of women and women’s rights-based training.

Overall, we found:

• There are very small impacts across credit and savings interventions for women’s economic empowerment (i.e., impacts on women’s agency and their economic achievements)—some were statistically significant and some were not.
• Financial products alone are insufficient for women’s economic empowerment. It is more likely that non-financial components matter more (e.g., skills training, awareness raising, etc.).
• Savings interventions may perform better than credit for women’s economic empowerment, but the differences are not significant.
• Individual intervention delivery outperforms group delivery for women’s agency outcomes, which is different to the prevailing literature.  Additional analysis suggests that anomalies in the data (outliers) influenced this result; therefore caution is required when interpreting these results.               

Previous evidence also suggests that financial-inclusion programming generally has mixed, inconsistent impacts and is not transformative. Unsurprisingly, we did not find any major impacts of credit and savings interventions on women’s economic empowerment.

We cannot, therefore, claim that credit and savings products alone can economically empower women, especially when the recent literature stresses that non-financial features of programs that emphasize awareness raising, skills training, education about women’s rights and enhancing women’s social networks potentially play a crucial role in the empowerment of women, more so than financial features. However, the success of these non-financial features of programs may depend on the characteristics of the women participating in the programs, for example their educational background, marital status, ethnicity, age, poverty status (ultra-poor vs moderately poor).

Moving forward – what are the gaps in the evidence base?

The results of our study are in line with a growing body of literature, reflecting ]the experience of the World Bank in promoting financial inclusion which concludes:

“The lack of conclusive evidence points to the inability of financial inclusion to deliver on its purported benefits.”

Our research and evidence base also uncovered gaps and lack on conclusive evidence on the following:

• The impact of non-financial interventions (skills training, awareness raising, social networks) vis-à-vis financial components on women’s economic empowerment through mixed-methods studies is not conclusive. There is also systematic data missing on how women’s characteristics influence the impacts of the non-financial interventions.
• There is a need for better tools to measure empowerment. Empowerment varies by culture and context, which requires gender-informed programming. In other words, program managers must design programs with women’s characteristics and needs in mind from the start to achieve empowerment impacts for women.
• The role of other contributing barriers to women’s economic empowerment, for example patriarchy, low wages, financial literacy, access to finance, and ethnicity and evidence on systematically bundling interventions to address these barriers through comprehensive solutions that focus on the non-financial features of the intervention.
• Testing innovations such as psychometric credit scoring to facilitate loan approval process for larger loans for female entrepreneurs, or exploring the use of digital financial services while being aware of the gender digital divide and social norms that underpin these barriers to implementation.   

Duvendack, M., Leon, M. D. A., & Filopoulos, J. 2025. “The impact of credit and savings interventions on women’s economic empowerment and agency: a meta-regression analysis”. Journal of Development Effectiveness, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/19439342.2025.2580615