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It is often assumed that gender strategies are inappropriate in banks and/or conflict with financial sustainability.
However there are many ways in which contribution to gender equality and women's empowerment can be increased even within financial sustainability constraints through:
- having a clear vision and commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment throughout their advertising and promotion in order to attract women clients and also change attitudes towards women's economic activities in the wider community.
- this vision and commitment should also underlie the types of questions asked during loan assessment of both women and men e.g. about family circumstances.
Many formal sector banks have been at the forefront of product innovation. This does however require more than introduction of a few small loan products of the man activities. It requires:
- mechanisms to enable women to graduate from small to larger loans without discrimination provided they have a good credit record.
- loan products and sponsorship of enterprise competitions to encourage women's enterprise in non-traditional activities and also in services needed by women.
- introduction not only of products specifically targeted to women, but revising the loan conditions for all products to ensure that there is no gender discrimination.
- encouragement of male savings for education of girls, assets for their daughters to take with them on marriage so that men's responsibility for the future of their daughters is encouraged and enable female savings to be used for enterprise investment.
Banks generally use individual rather than group-based lending and may not have scope for introducing non-financial services. This means that they cannot be expected to have the type of the focused empowerment strategies which NGOs have. Nevertheless, they can be actively involved in collaboration with other service providers giving for example:
- enterprise and business development services for women and providing loans to female trainees
- legal aid services for women
- reproductive health services for women
This collaboration could be formal partnerships or merely having literature available on these services for clients to read while they are waiting to see bank staff.
Banks can, and do, also enter into partnerships with NGOs and provide loans to groups or federations organised. This however presumes that the NGOs are not expected to be sustainable but have secure support for their organisational role.
Many formal sector banks have gender or equal opportunities policies for staff. Many also have childcare facilities and proactive promotion policies for female staff. Increasing the numbers of female staff is essential to increasing the numbers of female clients in many social contexts. Both female and male staff will however require gender training integrated into general induction training.
Most of these measures have minimal cost but would enable expansion of numbers of female clients and increase repayment rates. They would therefore enhance, rather than detract from, financial sustainability. The best way of integrating gender policy within existing practices and contexts can be assessed through a gender audit or a well-designed participatory process. This would entail some initial cost, but could be expected to recoup these costs through better outreach to good female clients.
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