FINCA’s Research and Data Science team provides a roadmap for integrating robust, context-specific metrics into the design of women’s empowerment efforts.
Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) is central to FINCA’s mission and inclusive finance, because while women are disproportionately affected by poverty, they are also more likely to invest in the wellbeing of their families and communities. Yet measuring women’s empowerment remains a challenge.
FINCA’s Research and Data Science team is working to better understand how family dynamics and gender roles interact with women’s financial decision-making. Drawing on our customer research studies on women’s savings behavior in Uganda, conducted in collaboration with the BRAC Institution of Governance and Development at BRAC University, we have found that standardized indicators often fail to capture the realities of women’s financial lives — and that locally derived measures are essential for meaningful evaluation.
Our latest policy brief highlights our findings from this work, where we used rigorous statistical validation to uncover which empowerment factors truly matter. The findings challenge conventional wisdom and offer practical guidance for designing programs that strengthen both empowerment and financial outcomes.
Key results from our research demonstrate:
- Standard metrics often mislead. Commonly used WEE indicators, such as private control over financial information or income, showed no statistical correlation with women’s actual savings behavior in our study. Applying these standardized metrics without adaptation risks measurement error.
- Local context is critical. Out of 230+ WEE/savings indicators tested in our study, a surprisingly small and highly localized subset performed best, including household financial responsibilities, future outlook, exposure to financial literacy training, financial strategies for old age, ability to compare various financial products, and decision-making power.
- Financial coaching improves performance, but with varied results. Coaching helped more socially vulnerable women set meaningful goals, while it led more empowered women to make more frequent savings deposits toward their goals.
Digital financial services can open doors, but they don’t guarantee empowerment outcomes for women; program designers must rigorously observe the dynamics at play. That means using metrics that are derived locally, grounded in the lived experiences of the women being targeted, and proven to demonstrate a robust, empirical link between empowerment and financial services. Without this connection, interventions run a high risk of measurement error — overlooking the crucial factors that truly shape women’s choices and outcomes.
Download the full policy brief to read more.
