Blind Spots: Gender in Digital Financial Services

Is This Course For You?

Whether your goals are commercial (to build a healthy business) or social (to promote human development) or a combination of the two, you may be missing important social groups in your efforts to promote digital financial services. This course, taking place online over four weeks, aims to shed light on overlooked populations, their financial needs and their potential as viable customers. Through a process of discovery and analysis, you’ll learn how to detect and remove supply-side blind spots, uncover new market opportunities, and imagine a future where new groups, especially women, use and enjoy high-quality financial services.

This course is designed for managers and aspiring leaders of banks, microfinance institutions, fintech, NGOs, and policy and regulatory bodies. We welcome members of think tank organisations, donors and academic institutions. No background in gender analysis and/ or financial inclusion is required.

What Are The Intended Outcomes?

By taking the course, students will pick up a set of analytical frameworks for discussing issues that pertain to market gaps. They will be able to apply concepts of power, gender and customer experiences to their individual projects or home institutions, and use them to strengthen their institutions and particular projects they may be working on.

Students coming out of the course should have an understanding of how blind spots occur, what the downsides of these blind spots are, and how to detect and address them. They will be familiar with key analytical tools, such as gender analysis, diffusion analysis and change theory and be able to apply these tools to remedy key omissions and overcome barriers that now hamper DFS’ efforts to reach women.