Elsie Addo Awadzi, the Bank of Ghana’s second deputy governor, is advocating for a more inclusive approach as part of the country’s financial inclusion plan.
According to her, Ghana is well-positioned to become a financially integrated society in the medium term, with high mobile money adoption and greater digital payments, as well as assisting women in becoming digital economy builders.
Elsie Addo Awadzi, speaking at an event organized by the United Nations Capital Development Fund, UNCDF, in partnership with the Bank of Ghana to honor this year’s International Women’s Day, said that this will help to improve women’s economic involvement in the country.
“It is widely acknowledged that digital financial services have the potential to make a significant difference in bridging the gender gap in access to finance which has remained at nine percent in the developing world since 2011. DFS can help bridge the gap in account ownership, increase women’s participation in the financial system and give them the opportunity to save formally or access credit. It can also help their business by lowering costs and giving access to a diversity of financial services,” she said.
She also charged women to leverage technology Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Elsie Addo Awadzi, has called on women to leverage opportunities that digitisation provides, as this is a sure way of bridging the gender equality-gap and increase their participation in economic activities.
“There are, in my view, more opportunities today than ever before to strive towards more gender equality. Technology and digitization hold great promise especially for the developing world to leapfrog economic, political, and social advancement of women by leveling the playing field in a cost-effective way and help to achieve in particular, SDG5 on “Gender equality and women’s empowerment”.
“The digital economy provides immense opportunities for women to advance themselves through online education and skills acquisition, telemedicine, increased trading in goods and services with more digital payment options, telework where it is available, digital savings, credit, insurance, investment and pensions opportunities, all leveraging widely available technology,” she added.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 which benchmarks 153 countries on their progress towards gender parity in four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity; Educational Attainment; Health and Survival; and Political Empowerment, globally, the average (population-weighted) distance completed to parity is at 68.6%.
This is an improvement from its last edition.
The number of women in senior roles within the Economic Participation and Opportunity dimension has also increased marginally, in that, globally, 36% of senior private sector managers and public sector officials are women (about 2% higher than the figure reported the previous year).
Despite the progress, the same report notes that there is still a 31.4% average gender gap across all four indicators that remains to be closed globally.
On average, the largest gender disparity remains the Political Empowerment gap. The second-largest gap is observed in the Economic Participation and Opportunity indicator, with 57.8% of this gap closed so far, which represents a slight step backwards since the year before.
