This Women’s World Banking report explores how rural Indonesian women navigate exclusion from formal finance while maintaining complex informal financial systems. The study reveals persistent regional disparities, with many women in Eastern Indonesia still lacking access to banking and digital services. Factors such as mobility restrictions, weak infrastructure, and limited financial products suited to rural realities hinder inclusion more than digital illiteracy itself.
The report recommends collaborative solutions that combine local agents, gender-sensitive product design, and partnerships with fintech platforms. It calls for multi-level strategies, strengthening agent networks, providing training, and engaging women leaders as advocates, to close the rural gender gap in finance. Achieving full inclusion, it argues, will empower women as key economic actors and improve household resilience nationwide.
Bibliography:
Salyanty, A. (2024, April). Reaching Rural Women: Catalyzing Financial Inclusion at the Edge of Finance. Women’s World Banking.