Mrs. Elsie Addo Awadzi, Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), has called for the adoption of gender-focused interventions to address both demand-side and supply-side constraints to enhance women participation in the fast growing digital economy in the country.
The Second Deputy Governor said that Ghana’s digital economy is fast-growing and fast-evolving, however, the country stands the real risk of excluding many of its hard-working women and their valuable contributions to its socio-economic development.
“Opportunities exist for women to harness the benefits of technology and new markets across Africa under the AfCFTA and beyond Africa, thanks to technology and e-commerce platforms among others. These market opportunities offer hope to women to start, sustain, and scale up their businesses and compete around the world. To enhance more participation of women in Ghana in the digital economy, however, there is the urgent need to address supply-side and demand-side barriers by adopting gender-focused interventions to respond swiftly to the opportunities presented by the digital economy”.
Elsie Addo Awadzi
The Second Deputy Governor said in her key note address at the International Women’s Day Dialogue that Women have been the backbone of Ghana’s economy and have from time immemorial, contributed significantly to “our socio-economic growth and development”.
To buttress this point, she cited a World Bank study that found that 44 percent of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Ghana are female-owned, and this sector accounts for about 92 percent of all businesses and contributes about 70 percent of Ghana’s GDP.
Women participation in private sector activities
Ghana’s private sector is dominated by women entrepreneurs, second only to Uganda, according to the 2019 MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs, she said. However, she said that women continue to face a lot of challenges especially, with regards to access to finance and digital services.
“The reality however, is that while the digital economy helps to overcome some of the barriers women face (lack of access to physical bank branches, mobility constraints, and privacy concerns among others) that prevent them from accessing formal financial services and from full participation in the traditional economy, some barriers remain even in the digital economy. In addition to those, there are also other barriers that are peculiar to the digital economy. This creates the so-called ‘digital gender divide’ that inhibits women’s full uptake of Digital Financial Services (DFS)”.
Elsie Addo Awadzi
She said a lack of literacy and digital skills, a general lack of trust in DFS, and a lack of affordability are key barriers to mobile internet adoption and barriers to the effective use of DFS.
Citing the GSMA’s 2021 Mobile Gender Gap Report, the Deputy BoG Governor said that the report suggests that women are 15 percent less likely to own a smartphone than men, down from 20 percent in 2019, with 234 million fewer women than men accessing the mobile internet.
Beyond the social cost, Mrs. Elsie Addo Awadzi said that excluding women from the digital economy can take a significant economic toll on low and lower-middle income countries. Yet again, she cited figures from the Alliance for Affordable Internet, which highlighted that over the last decade, these countries have lost a total of US$1 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP) to the gender gap in internet use.
Based on current tax-to-GDP ratios in these countries, this loss represents an estimated US$24.7 billion in lost tax revenue in 2020. Unless the gap significantly narrows, she said the report warned that these countries will likely continue to lose billions more of economic activity each year, if women continue to be excluded from the digital world.
Close the gap in access to finance for women
Mrs. Elsie Addo Awadzi said a lot remains to be done, to close the gap in access to finance for women as they seek new opportunities to fully participate in the fast-evolving digital economy. She called for the need to get all stakeholders on board in a coordinated fashion to address all barriers that perpetrate the gender gap in financial inclusion and economic empowerment for women.
Also, she said financial and digital literacy programmes must be designed specifically for women and girls and consistently rolled out in ways that are easily accessible to help demystify formal financial services in general and digital financial services in particular. She further suggested that digital financial services must be more widely available and designed with more women in mind to ensure that their unique needs are met.
She iterated that policy makers and regulators must be intentional about designing and implementing gender-specific interventions – based on reliable sex-disaggregated data – to design interventions that help remove barriers that women face in accessing DFS, particularly interventions that promote availability, affordability, transparency and fair pricing, and integrity, in the DFS market. She however, said that women must also play their part by searching for and understanding financial options available to them. Gender-Focused Gender-Focused Gender-Focused
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