Senior Manager
Sonal is a Senior Manager at MSC and leads the Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) practice.
India’s blanket approach to financial inclusion is leaving women behind: Here are four ways to close the gender gap
India has been at the forefront of digital innovations in financial services, helping millions participate in the financial economy through their mobile phones. However, this progress and innovation are meaningless for the millions of Indian women who remain excluded from basic banking in the first place. The strategies we have discussed in this blog directly impact women’s financial inclusion.
Apr 28, 2022
Apr 28, 2022
Job losses, business closure — Covid hit female entrepreneurs. Here’s how to support them
This article discusses the impact of COVID-19 on women-owned enterprises and highlights the key challenges they face. It calls for creating an enabling ecosystem to promote women’s entrepreneurship and suggests six key enablers that could catalyze women’s entrepreneurship in India.
Mar 31, 2022
Mar 31, 2022
Caregiving, the hidden engine of the economy
The joint op-ed published in The Hindu BusinessLine, cowritten by MSC and NITI Aayog, talks about the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work on women. This disproportionate burden is an issue of equality and economic growth. The op-ed argues that market development and innovation in the “Care sector” have the potential to offer solutions and choices to reduce this unfair burden on women.
Mar 31, 2022
Women and DFS
This blog highlights the key drivers of gender gaps in women’s access to digital financial services and their use. It shares how the adoption of DFS among women can catalyze the mitigation of this gender gap. It uses insights from a first-time DFS user’s journey to highlight how to understand and respond better to women’s exclusion.
Mar 11, 2022
Mar 11, 2022
Women’s agent network—the missing link in India’s financial inclusion story: A supply-side perspective
About 10% of 1.26 million BCs in India are women. This policy note discusses a supply-side perspective on challenges and opportunities to expand the women agent network in India.
Feb 21, 2022
Feb 21, 2022
GOOTCHA—A framework to build gender-sensitive ID systems
The World Bank estimates that around a billion people across the globe lack a “legal identity.” The gender gap in terms of people’s access to official IDs is considerable in low-income countries, where one in two women lack any form of official ID. This limits financial, social, and political participation for women.
Mar 12, 2021
Arshi Aadil, Saloni Tandon, Sonal Jaitly, Sneha Sampath, Venkat Goli and Akhand Tiwari
Mar 12, 2021
Arshi Aadil, Saloni Tandon, Sonal Jaitly, Sneha Sampath, Venkat Goli and Akhand Tiwari
Working paper: A framework for building gender-sensitive identity systems
One in two women in low-income countries lack official identification documents, which limits their financial, social, and political participation. This report explores the design and lifecycle of ID systems from gender and behavioral lenses and proposes a framework to make them more gender-sensitive.
Mar 10, 2021
Arshi Aadil, Saloni Tandon, Sonal Jaitly, Sneha Sampath, Venkat Goli and Akhand Tiwari
Mar 10, 2021
Arshi Aadil, Saloni Tandon, Sonal Jaitly, Sneha Sampath, Venkat Goli and Akhand Tiwari
COVID -19 recovery is likely to fail women- digital financial services can help, if designed well
Response to COVID-19 pandemic needs to be gender transformative so that fundamental gender issues like social norms, access to resources etc are addressed . Can digital solutions help?
Nov 10, 2020
Nov 10, 2020