By Jack Aldane
Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and former director for gender and development at the World Bank, spoke to Jack Aldane about her latest research, which underscores what lies in the way of female economic empowerment and what needs to change if the next billion women worldwide are to get access to finance.
Development Finance Magainze: The development financial institutions (DFIs) of the G7 have pledged US$3 billion in investments towards female economic empowerment. Where should that investment go from what you’ve gathered in recent research?
Mayra Buvinic: Financial constraints constrain all entrepreneurs, but women are more affected by not having access to finance, and to formal finance in particular. Whatever mechanisms to fund women become available now, I think it’s going to be a matter of how you programme those funds and what kinds of institutions are going to be used to channel those funds. The World Bank now has its We-Fi initiative, which targets small and medium-sized enterprises, but the majority of women are still micro. As micro entrepreneurs, they have benefitted from microfinance, but not from the formal sector. These funds from the G7 DFIs should be structured in such a way that they get to women-owned microfinance firms. That’s a bit more difficult, so I’m not sure that that is going to happen.
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