Friday, March 29, 2024

Women need financial identity-Graca Machel

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Bank of Zambia Deputy Governor for Administration, Dr. Tukiya Kankasa-Mabula confers with Graca Machel during the first ever SADC workshop focused on promoting women financial inclusion in the region held in Johannesburg, South Africa
Bank of Zambia Deputy Governor for Administration, Dr. Tukiya Kankasa-Mabula confers with Graca Machel during the first ever SADC workshop focused on promoting women financial inclusion in the region held in Johannesburg, South Africa

The Graca Machel Trust says there is need for countries in the SADC region to address women’s financial inclusion.

Chairperson of the Graca Machel Trust Graca Machel noted that majority of women in the region are not financially included.

Speaking when she addressed delegates at the first ever SADC workshop focused on promoting women financial inclusion in the region held in Johannesburg, South Africa, Ms. Machel emphasised the need to work as a region and not only as countries in addressing women’s financial inclusion.

SADC is implementing a strategy on financial inclusion and small and medium sized enterprises’ (SMEs) access to finance.

A key objective of this strategy is for member states to implement policies that will ensure that financial services are accessible by all including women and youth to enable them to participate in economic activities.

This workshop is the first step in strengthening institutional capacity for SADC member states to be gender focused when planning and evaluating programmes.

The workshop, co-hosted by SADC, The Graca Machel Trust, Financial Sector Deepening Zambia (FSD Zambia), FSD Mozambique and Finmark Trust brought together key players in the financial sector including central banks, financial institutions and fintechs.

“Women need a financial identity. It is not unacceptable that up to 50% of SADC countries populations are not part of the formal economy – and many people in the informal economy are women” Ms. Machel said.

In her key note address, Bank of Zambia Deputy Governor for Administration, Dr. Tukiya Kankasa-Mabula, noted that Women are overrepresented among the unbanked and represent 56% of the total unbanked adult population globally.

Furthermore, she observed that the World Economic Forum noted that the sub-saharan Africa region is the third-largest gender gap among the eight regions of the world behind East Asia and the Pacific region.

She mentioned that there was a 6% gender gap in accessing financial services in the SADC region.

“In view of the evidence of the prevailing gender gap in the SADC region, we commend SADC for placing women’s financial inclusion on their broad agenda to promote financial inclusion. This action, which serves to augment existing initiatives, emphasises the theme of the workshop on ‘Doing This Together’ through collaboration and partnerships. In doing so, we can have impact and achieve more to advance financial inclusion for women”. Dr. Kankasa-Mabula said.

Meanwhile, FSD Zambia Chief Executive Officer Betty Wilkinson said “Zambia has the 5th youngest population in the World. So when we talk about financial inclusion for women, we are talking about young women and girls too”.

Ms. Wilkinson said that with core support from UK Aid and SIDA, FSD Zambia set up a women and financial inclusion project that has since scored various successes including lobbying that government place the digitisation of school fees payments into the national financial inclusion strategy for implementation by 2020.

The workshop ran from March 27-28 March 2019.

2 COMMENTS

  1. All talk is about women , women! And this is coming from the so called enlightened women! Alanaifwe bashi Tata rule hula chine chine. Panondi nenspato shalibeyama; abakashi balimbutuka. Meletipo shani? You want us to steal?

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