Global Learning Partnership for Women's Economic Empowerment & Digital Financial Inclusion

Mathematica serves as the global learning partner for this two-phase project with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Gender Equality and Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) teams’ investment in improving women’s economic empowerment through digital financial inclusion. The project aims to support the digitization and gender-intentional design of bulk payment programs, in order to direct payments into accounts owned and operated by women. Known as the Digitize, Direct, and Design (D3) Initiative, this is a key investment for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Women’s Economic Empowerment and Financial Inclusion (WEE-FI) strategy. In Phase 1 of the project, we focused on developing a global evaluation strategy and learning agenda around government-to-people (G2P) payments in three target countries. In Phase 2 of the project, Mathematica has been working on an expansion of the strategy to cover all nine of the FSP priority countries as well as additional payment types including wage digitization and humanitarian payments.

Mathematica's work on implementing this expanded strategy will be to provide insights into which D3 interventions add value to women’s lives, whether these impacts are robust across geographies, and which D3 principles need further refinement and study. We are also implementing an evaluation of wage digitization in Bangladesh and supporting the foundations broader WEE-FI strategy through analysis of financial inclusion data in the priority countries.