The gender gap in access to finance widened to 11% in 2021, compared with 9% that had persisted since 2017, the Bank of Ghana has revealed.

However, the percentage of women accessing finance had increased from 27% in 2011 to 63% in 2021.

Speaking on behalf of the Governor of the Bank of Ghana at the launch of the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) Finance Series organised by the African Development Bank, Second Deputy Governor, Elsie Addo-Awadzi said despite the critical role of women in economic development, access to finance has been a major constraint for women-owned businesses.

“With an estimated $42 billion financing shortfall for African women-owned businesses as estimated by the AfDB across all value chains, women entrepreneurs encounter various obstacles when accessing finance. This translates into constrained overall economic growth and resilience, and lost opportunities for all”, she pointed out.

Mrs. Addo-Awadzi therefore welcome the partnership between AFAWA, the African Guarantee Fund, and the Ghana Association of Banks, saying, “it is very timely and urgent, as part of efforts to help our economy recover from the current macroeconomic challenges, and make it more resilient going forward”.

“The partnership also holds great potential to equip women-owned businesses to spearhead the development of the single Africa market under the African Continental Free Trade Agreement to help expand our economy and create more jobs for our youthful population”, she added.

She therefore called on all stakeholders to get on board to support this initiative, for the common good, stating, the Bank of Ghana stands ready to continue to lend its support to ensure the realisation of the objectives of this partnership.

In November 2019, the Bank of Ghana launched Ghana’s Sustainable Banking Principles – a set of seven Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) – related principles, which enjoins banks to among other things promote financial inclusion and gender equity in their internal operations and in relation to their delivery of products and services to clients.

The Second Deputy Governor said banks are currently reporting to the Bank of Ghana on a quarterly basis, in compliance with these principles, “and we expect to see higher levels of compliance”.

“We believe that the AFAWA initiative will be critical in supporting the banks with the necessary capacity building and sources of funding to support their efforts at improving more gender inclusive finance.”

The Bank of Ghana has also recently implemented a new online reporting and analytics supervisory tool by which our regulated financial institutions submit their prudential returns to us on a monthly basis on a sex-disaggregated basis. As a result, financial institutions report not only aggregate numbers in terms of financial products and services, but also the gender dynamics of their customer base and product and service offerings.

This, Mrs. Addo-Awadzi said should help address current data constraints and provide critical data for evidence-based design of policy making, regulation, and supervisory measures as well as financial products and services.