Leave No One Behind by Homi Kharas

Author:Homi Kharas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Note: The horizontal axis refers to the overall financial inclusion measured by the ratio of adults owning an account with a financial institution or mobile money service in 2017. The vertical axis refers to the gender gap in financial inclusion in 2017 measured by subtracting women’s financial inclusion from men’s. The circle size represents the size of the country’s unbanked population as of 2017. The vertical line in the middle-right of the graph represents 69 percent, the global average of financial inclusion.

Source: Author’s calculation using World Bank (2017).

The Philippines can be considered an exceptional country in the global perspective: data from the Global Findex database for the Philippines from 2011, 2014, and 2017 show, overall, a modest but continuous increase in the rate of having bank accounts equally for both men and women.12 While financial inclusion rates remain lower compared to neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, a comparison between access to bank accounts by men and by women in the Philippines shows very interesting results. From 2011 to 2017, the Global Findex database shows a gender gap reversal, where women with bank accounts outnumber men by as much as 15 percentage points in 2011, with the difference decreasing until 2017. Not only in having accounts at formal institutions do women outperform men; in terms of having savings, data from the 2017 Financial Inclusion data of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) show that women are twice as likely to have an account than men in general.13

What factors contribute to this gender gap reversal? In the literature, several interconnected factors are raised. One reason is the high remittance inflow to the country. The Philippines depends highly on overseas workers and remittances, where one in ten households sends a migrant worker overseas; remittances account for 10 percent of the national GDP. Remittances, both international and domestic, make up a big proportion of person-to-person (P2P) transactions in the country. According to the survey by the BSP, 32 percent of Filipino adults had a remittance transaction in 2017. Among them, the incidence of receiving money is higher for females and situated in rural areas.

A second reason for this reversal is the strategy of expanding access points for microfinance and other more easily accessible FIs since the year 2000. The strategy encouraged the installation of access points to banks and microfinance institutions in 90 percent of the municipalities in the country.14 According to data from the BSP, in 2017, there were 162 banks with microfinance operations serving almost 2 million borrowers, with outstanding loans amounting to 17 billion Philippine pesos.15 The difference between women and men in microfinance account ownership is at 13.7 percentage points, suggesting that microfinance may be a more familiar and easier to access option for women.16

Third, the national government has been active in campaigning for better financial inclusion of both men and women. Overarching the policies to facilitate financial inclusion is the Philippine government’s National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (NSFI), which spans financial literacy programs for migrants, students, professionals, and other sectors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.