## International Monetary Fund Releases Gender Disaggregated Financial Access Survey

_IMF News, March 19, 2018_

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [International Monetary Fund Releases Gender Disaggregated Financial Access Survey](https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2018/03/19/pr1895-imf-releases-gender-disaggregated-financial-access-survey)

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## Bibliographic details
- Published: March 19, 2018

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### Overview and context
- Press Release No. 18/95
- Date: March 19, 2018
- The IMF conducts an annual Financial Access Survey (FAS), described as a high-quality supply-side financial inclusion database with a global reach to support policy analysis and formulation in the financial inclusion area.
- The 2016 FAS round included a pilot to capture the financial access gender data gap and support the IMF’s analysis of women’s economic empowerment in boosting growth and reducing income inequality.
- The 2016 pilot included the participation of 28 countries; it revealed that in almost half of the participating economies, financial service providers had access to their customers’ gender information.

### Expanded 2017 pilot: participation and data coverage
- An expanded pilot in 2017 invited all IMF country members to report the gender breakdown of their commercial banks’ depositors and borrowers.
- 27 countries provided information on the gender breakdown from 2004–16, almost doubling the number of reporting countries compared with the 2016 pilot.
- Two-thirds of the countries reporting gender-disaggregated data provided historical series, enabling trend analysis.

### Key findings and statistics
- The results reveal the increasing availability of data on gender‑related financial access over the past four years.
- For gender-disaggregated reporting countries in 2016, the average share of female depositors and borrowers was around 40 percent.
- The expanded pilot identified noticeable cross‑regional differences in the financial access gender gap; variations could be linked to cross‑country differences in women’s participation in the labor market.
- Cross-country comparisons show cases of apparent steady closing of the gender gap in Chile, Indonesia and Malaysia from 2012–16.

### Policy-relevant observations and initiatives
- Availability of consistent, reliable and internationally comparable information is vital to focus attention on policies that could help close the financial access gender gap.
- Examples of initiatives that may contribute to closing the gap:
  - Malaysia’s Women Entrepreneur Financing Program.
  - Chile’s Simplified Deposit Accounts (requiring only a national identification to open an account).
- Improvements in data collection and granularity could foster deeper analysis of gender-disaggregated financial access.

### IMF actions and next steps
- FAS will continue to work with country authorities to address data collection challenges and to improve cross-country comparability of financial access information.
- The FAS is a key element of the IMF’s “Data for Decisions (D4D) Fund”—a multi-partner trust fund that will be launched in mid-2018 and aims to fund statistics capacity development to broaden the availability of data to policy-makers and support the monitoring of the SDGs.
- The IMF will make future FAS rounds an integral standard part of the survey to reflect the importance of gender-disaggregated financial access information.

*International Monetary Fund, Press Release No. 18/95 (March 19, 2018).*

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## References

- [Chile and the IMF](http://www.imf.org/external/country/CHL/index.htm)
- [Indonesia and the IMF](http://www.imf.org/external/country/IDN/index.htm)
- [Malaysia and the IMF](http://www.imf.org/external/country/MYS/index.htm)
- [Press Releases](https://www.imf.org/en/news/searchnews)
- [PRESS CENTER](http://presscenter.imf.org/)
- [FAS website](http://data.imf.org/?sk=E5DCAB7E-A5CA-4892-A6EA-598B5463A34C)
- [IMF Managing Director’s Announcement of Specific Actions on
Women’s Economic Empowerment](http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2016/09/22/PR16420-Lagarde-Announces-Specific-Actions-on-Womens-Economic-Empowerment)
- [https://www.imf.org/en/home](https://www.imf.org/en/home)

_Source: https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2018/03/19/pr1895-imf-releases-gender-disaggregated-financial-access-survey_