Financial inclusion is an important pathway to advancing women's economic empowerment and gender equity. That’s why providing women with capital has been one of Kiva’s top impact objectives since our inception. Kiva has facilitated over $1.6 billion in loans to more than 3.9 million women borrowers around the world. Of all the loans that Kiva has extended on its platform, 80% have been directed to women borrowers.
Beyond financial inclusion: financial transformation
While financial inclusion is key to facilitating financial access for underserved populations like women, simply including women in the financial system is not sufficient to close the gender gap, especially when the gender inequities that impede women’s financial success are left unaddressed.
At Kiva, we are aware that not only inclusion, but also transformation of our financial ecosystem will be necessary to advance women’s economic empowerment and ultimately drive towards systemic gender equity. Whereas gender equality means giving people equal access to rights and opportunities, regardless of their gender identity or expression, gender equity means allocating resources based on the needs of individuals (rather than to everyone equally) without gender bias or discrimination.
In addition to facilitating financial access for women, Kiva is also committed to deepening our understanding of the financial barriers that women face and engendering institutional change, all while continuing to scale the number of women we serve. In fact, as part of our commitment recently announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, Kiva is dedicated to advancing gender-forward financial access for 500,000 women by 2025.
A tool to assess gender equality in organizations
In an effort to deepen impact for women borrowers, Kiva sought continued support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to develop a rating tool that measures how financial service providers (FSPs) are incorporating gender equity in their products, practices, and policies. Building upon the insights gleaned from Kiva’s Gender Lens Investment (GLI) Landscape Study (2021), together with USAID, we developed a holistic gender lens rating tool that, while created for FSPs, can be used by other industry stakeholders to assess how an organization considers gender across its operations.
Through the tool, Kiva aims to provide the financial services industry with a quantitative way to holistically assess the gendered impact of organizations. The results of the analysis provided by the tool can be used to initiate dialogues that drive gender-forward transformation, reform company policies related to women’s leadership, shift power and resources into the hands of women around the world, and ultimately advance gender equity.
Kiva’s Gender Equity Assessment Rating (GEAR) tool
Kiva developed a Gender Equity Assessment Rating (GEAR) tool as a direct response to the insights gleaned from the GLI Landscape Study. The tool builds upon the voice of the industry by operationalizing the feedback we received through stakeholder conversations conducted as part of the study.
Designed as a tool to be used by FSPs themselves, GEAR assesses the extent to which an FSP integrates and operationalizes gender across its organization. Although Kiva developed GEAR as a tool for FSPs, it can also be leveraged as a publicly available, standalone gender lens framework. Kiva encourages other industry stakeholders who are interested in applying a gender lens—–such as investors, asset managers, or technical assistance providers—to use GEAR as they vet new potential partners or determine opportunities for further technical assistance.
Born out of recognition that gender equity is integral to the overall social impact of the FSPs that Kiva partners with, GEAR evaluates FSPs’ gender efforts across five dimensions, including:
Representation of women clients
Provision of tailored financial products and services for women
Efforts taken to understand gender-disaggregated client needs
Integration of gender considerations across workplace policies and practices
Representation of women in the workforce and leadership positions
Utilizing Kiva’s GEAR components
Results across these five components are scored to identify potential opportunities to engage partners in transforming their work environments, practices, policies, and products to advance gender equity. Though referred to in its entirety as GEAR, Kiva’s gender equity assessment rating is made up of three interrelated resources designed to be collectively used to assess an FSP’s gender efforts. Kiva designed each component of GEAR using free and publicly available software to ensure that the tool is accessible by everyone. GEAR is comprised of the following resources:
Gender Survey of 20+ questions formulated from research, evidence evaluations, and insights from key stakeholder interviews outlined in Kiva’s 2021 GLI Landscape Report. This survey is designed to be completed as a self-assessment conducted by the FSP, and aims to assess FSPs approach to gender on both an institutional and a client level. A list of the Gender Survey Questions can be found in the Appendix of the GEAR User Manual.
Pre-weighted GEAR Calculator and scoring system that ultimately generates an overall GEAR score on a scale of 1-10, where a score of 1 indicates a substantial organizational need to become more gender-forward and a score of 10 indicates a strong, gender-forward organization. This publicly available, weighted GEAR Calculator can be downloaded and a copy can be made for your own use.
The GEAR User Manual, designed to guide an FSP through the inputs, scoring system, and calculation process to generate a rating.
Kiva developed GEAR to be an evolving tool—one that will be adapted and refined over time based on institutional learnings, partner feedback, and industry best practices. After 18+ years of working with local partners to best serve their clients, we understand that contextual knowledge is essential and that barriers to women’s financial inclusion are rooted in local, sociocultural contexts. Questions that specifically address social and gender norms (such as women's limited mobility) are included in the GEAR survey. We’re dedicated to working alongside partner FSPs to continue to develop, test, iterate, and calibrate GEAR results based on FSP learnings, responses, and feedback.
Pushing the gender lens investing space forward
By sharing this first iteration of GEAR publicly, Kiva hopes to expand upon the types of gender equity resources available in the financial inclusion space and push the industry forward to advance gender equality for all. Though GEAR is designed to specifically assess how FSPs consider gender across their products, policies and practices, the questions embedded in GEAR and the insights the tool can provide can be adapted and utilized in various contexts, settings, and applications. Kiva encourages GEAR to be used by not only FSPs, but also asset managers, investors, and/or technical assistance providers committed to advancing gender equity in the financial inclusion space.
It is Kiva’s hope that GEAR can be both a gender diagnostic tool for the financial inclusion space, as well as a catalyst for future transformative action, by revealing where gender equitable interventions are needed most.
United to build a more gender equitable system
Kiva believes that gender equity cannot advance through disparate and siloed efforts. Like an interconnected system of small gears, with cogs that leverage and multiply efforts, it is Kiva’s hope that this GEAR tool enables a leveraging effect in support of a more gender equitable future. Kiva publicly shares GEAR out of a desire to build an ecosystem where financial resources are channeled towards transformative impact that enables women’s economic empowerment.
By fostering greater understanding of the nuanced challenges faced by different genders, GEAR has the potential to promote dialogue, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing among industry leaders. Ultimately, Kiva hopes that GEAR can serve as a catalyst for mainstreaming gender equity in investment portfolios and transforming gender-responsive policies, products, and services undertaken by FSPs. We are deeply grateful for USAID’s partnership in this effort to close gender gaps in women’s economic empowerment and financial resilience.
This post is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this blog are the sole responsibility of Kiva and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
