Integrating Gender and Women’s Financial Inclusion into the Central Bank of Egypt’s (CBE) Framework

Egyptian women who constitute half of the population, represent tremendous economic potential, while contributing to only 22.5 percent of total labor force - offer an estimated credit demand of USD283 million among female-owned SMEs.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) has achieved major accomplishments towards building an inclusive financial system through introducing a number of initiatives to provide financially underserved households and female MSME owners with an opportunity to be part of the formal financial system. This has been achieved through working on a number of pillars that include:

• enabling the legal and regulatory framework conditions
• modernizing the financial infrastructure
• building a comprehensive gender-disaggregated data, complemented with the supply side data from financial institutions

View the case study for more in-depth insights into how CBE and national stakeholders have exerted substantial efforts to address gender and women’s financial exclusion.