NextBillion - A WDI Publication

The post-USAID era is being shaped in real time, with profound implications for the ongoing progress toward gender equality in financial inclusion and other global development priorities. 

The agency played a central role in funding gender-specific programs, integrating gender across its work, and conducting gender research and analysis — an approach that was codified into law with the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018. It also built capacity and coordination in the public and private sectors and across civil society, preserving lessons, advocating for gender equality, and putting the need to address violence against women firmly on the global agenda. 

Without that anchor, the movement toward gender equality in international development risks fragmentation and regression. But this moment also opens space for the field to decide what comes next — including what financial inclusion should actually prioritize.

For the financial inclusion sector, the answer is clear: We must sustain the progress we’ve made toward gender-intentionality in how we design, fund, regulate and evaluate financial systems. And we must continue to move away from “male universality” — the assumption that male experience is the default — taking seriously how identity, circumstances, needs, behavior and environment shape what people actually need from financial products and services. 

Preserving this momentum is not simply a matter of values. It is a matter of evidence.

What the Field Has Learned — and the Risks of Forgetting

Over the past couple of decades, gains in women’s account ownership, mobile access and use of digital financial services have been significant. 

Yet these gains have been uneven and incomplete. Gender gaps persist across access and use — particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — and many women remain excluded from the full benefits of formal finance.

Experience across product design, policy reform and consumer protection points to a clear reason for this inconsistent progress: Access alone is not enough. 

The evidence for this conclusion is consistent across regions and income levels:

• A well-designed, women-centered financial product fails when it ignores the barriers presented by discriminatory social norms related to women’s mobility, control over income or decision-making power. 
• The rise in digital tools is undeniable — and uneven. And providing tools without safeguards can increase women’s physical, social and economic risk. For instance, women with smartphones are often more exposed to frauds, scams and gender-based violence and take longer to recover, discouraging use and damaging trust. 
• Policy and regulatory reforms enable women’s access to financial services, but sustained gains depend on complementary changes in provider behavior, consumer protection and social norms.

Importantly, this same body of evidence has also established a clear business case for women’s inclusion within formal financial systems:

• Women are, on average, at lower risk of default and have greater loyalty. They also represent a high-growth, untapped market, and financial institutions could capture $700 billion in revenue by better serving them. 
• Gender-diverse C-suites have above average profitability and value creation.
• Companies with diverse leadership are consistently associated with stronger financial performance, innovation and brand outcomes.
• Policies, products and investments that close gender gaps can drive economic growth by increasing women’s labor force participation, boosting productivity and expanding entrepreneurship: This can strengthen global GDP substantially, generating increases of up to $7 trillion from closing gaps in work and leadership alone, and $22–28 trillion with full equality.

This business case matters, but it does not automatically overcome institutional inertia, embedded norms or weak data systems: To navigate those challenges, the support and guidance of agenda-setting funders is necessary. And indeed, much of this evidence base was built because major donors, particularly USAID, funded and mandated it. With USAID’s closure, that research is ending, and the data, institutional knowledge and funding that sustained it are all at risk. The quiet erosion of this evidence base has already begun. 

Building evidence is costly, but it’s a key driver of the movement toward greater gender equality in financial inclusion and other sectors. Without this evidence, organizations are more likely to optimize for short-term returns, and serving women gets deprioritized because the returns take longer to materialize and the upfront investment is higher. This perpetuates the exclusion of women, and in a world where sex-disaggregated data is still not the default, this exclusion is often structurally invisible.

Meanwhile, significant barriers to women’s financial inclusion remain, and the evidence base underlying the business case still needs to be expanded, strengthened and maintained. What the field does next will determine whether financial inclusion builds on what it has learned — or reverts to old business models that center men, in the absence of incentives to do otherwise.

Why This Moment Is Different

The post-USAID environment presents three interrelated challenges for women’s financial inclusion.

First, there is a loss of institutional knowledge. The departure of experienced practitioners, combined with the fragmentation of shared learning systems, threatens the continuity of gender-intentional practice. What has been learned is not lost, but how we learn from one another and rebuild our community is uncertain. 

Second, the funding landscape is shifting. New and emerging development actors are filling parts of the financing gap. This diversification is not inherently negative — but it does change incentives, expectations and accountability structures in ways that are not always transparent. For example, unlike OECD-DAC donors that report against standardized transparency and gender equality frameworks, development finance providers like China do not participate in these reporting systems, limiting the availability of comparable data on financing terms, safeguards and gender-related outcomes. For service providers and other stakeholders in women’s financial inclusion, this is an opportunity to hold our shared values as guiding principles as we engage with a new landscape of funders. 

Third, there is less money overall. No single donor or philanthropy can replace the scale of what has been lost from USAID’s funding. Scarcity creates pressure — to move faster, to simplify, and to prioritize scale over substance. In that environment, gender equality, consumer protection and harm reduction are often among the first considerations to be treated as optional in financial services. In tighter funding and political environments, stakeholders will narrow their focus toward interventions with easily measurable or immediate returns, while longer-term investments in gender equality, labor rights, consumer protection and harm reduction become more vulnerable to retrenchment. At the same time, not enough gender data exists — or it exists but hasn’t been leveraged well — to drive investment dollars into these longer-term interventions. 

Together, these dynamics create a real risk of regression.

The Responsibility Now Rests with Practitioners

Ultimately, this is more than a funding crisis; it is a test of professional accountability.

Without a dominant donor like USAID setting standards — however imperfectly — the burden of upholding human dignity, equity and rights increasingly rests with those of us who design, implement, regulate and evaluate financial inclusion efforts. Donor requirements and funding helped institutionalize gender intentionality across the sector, particularly in areas markets do not naturally prioritize on their own: data collection, experimentation, measurement, consumer protection, accountability, and reaching populations that are harder or slower to serve. This moment places greater responsibility on the field itself to preserve the values, evidence and accountability structures that made progress possible. 

Economic systems center men by default due to the persistent myth of gender neutrality. Inclusive finance solutions that lack a gender-inclusive lens simply perpetuate this myth. If there ever was a moment to re-center the way economic systems function — to center all the unique ways people identify — this is it. When women are centered, benefits accrue more broadly, to households, communities and economies.

Moving Forward: What the Future of Financial Inclusion Must Become

For much of the past two decades, financial inclusion has been defined by a simple progression: from informal to formal, from cash to accounts, from exclusion to inclusion in the financial system. The underlying assumption was straightforward: If a person has an account, they are included.

We now know this framing is flawed. Instead, the sector should be focused on a more holistic progression, which includes:

• Shifting from formality to quality: Whether a service is formal is less important than whether it is useful, safe and empowering. Inclusion should be judged by whether financial services help people do what they need to do — manage risk, smooth income, invest and exercise control of their financial lives.
• Moving from individual accounts to collective strength: Economic security is rarely individual. For many people, especially women, resilience is built through community — through savings groups, shared resources, reciprocal support and collective risk management. Financial inclusion frameworks must reflect how wealth and security actually function, not reduce their focus to what one person holds alone.
• Moving beyond transactions toward livelihoods and shared value: Finance is not an end in itself. It is a tool that should support work, childcare and long-term economic participation. The next phase of financial inclusion must connect financial services to jobs, families, value chains and livelihoods, creating shared value that is both socially grounded and economically viable.

Finally, this shift demands a change in how the field measures success. What we choose to measure reflects what we value. Moving toward quality, community and livelihoods makes measurement more complex — but also more honest. Investing in better data and being more open to learning across institutions is not optional if financial inclusion is to remain credible.

The post-USAID era is being written now, and our sector must understand the implications of the new reality we’re operating in. This moment demands a deliberate commitment from all of us to reject “one-size-fits-all” approaches and unite around bold, concrete actions in support of inclusive financial systems. It also requires us to hold one another accountable to the highest standard, and to commit to measuring what actually counts, not just what is easiest to count — despite the resource-constrained environment. The future of inclusive finance depends on that commitment.

Julia Arnold is a researcher, strategist and consultant specializing in women’s financial and economic inclusion; Sara Seavey is a gender equality and social inclusion consultant with extensive experience in inclusive economic growth and women’s financial inclusion.

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