New Delhi [India], November 21 (ANI): Indian banks could tap into a USD 688 billion untapped financial opportunity by adopting gender-intelligent design practices, according to a new report by MicroSave Consulting (MSC) and the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM).
The publication comes at a critical juncture for India’s economy, as the continued underrepresentation of women across the financial ecosystem is estimated to cost the country USD 688 billion, impacting its ambition to become a USD 5 trillion economy.
While India has made strides in expanding access to financial services, active usage among women remains low, leaving one of the country’s largest untapped market segments
“Over the years, multiple actors have tried to mainstream gender into banking, but the results have been, at best, patchy. Gender-intelligent banking offers a systematic, operational approach to integrate gender within financial institutions; across business strategy, products and services, operations, and policy and governance,” said Akhand Jyoti Tiwari, Senior Partner, MSC.
“If tapped right, gender-intelligent banking alone can contribute 10 per cent of India’s USD 5 trillion economy goal,” said Dr Partha Ray, NIBM Director.
With female labour force participation rising sharply from 23.3 per cent to 41.7 per cent over the past six years, the report says there is an immediate business opportunity for banks and financial institutions. The whitepaper identifies four key areas of opportunity.
In deposits, women hold 1 billion bank accounts, yet nearly 497 million remain inactive, and activating these accounts could generate an incremental USD 253 billion in deposits, providing a critical boost amid rising credit growth.
In credit, women hold only 23 per cent of total outstanding retail credit (USD 212 billion compared to men’s USD 692 billion). With 110 million loan accounts unmet, this represents a USD 193.3 billion lending opportunity, with the average loan size for women at USD 1,712, compared to men at USD 2,825.
In investments, only 1.8 per cent of Indian women actively invest, leaving potential retail AUM growth from USD 235 billion to USD 477 billion, unlocking USD 242.3 billion.
In pensions, women account for 45 per cent of Atal Pension Yojana subscribers but accumulate USD 46,000-85,000 less than men due to career breaks and lower contributions, the report added. (ANI)
This was first published on ANI on Fri, Nov 21, 2025
Women’s account ownership in India has grown exponentially through initiatives, such as the PMJDY. Yet, they remain significantly underserved in terms of usage, value of engagement, and access to higher-order financial services. Financial institutions must therefore recognize women as a diverse and strategically important customer segment with distinct financial behaviors, and not just as a social mandate.
This white paper, developed by MSC in collaboration with the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM), presents a comprehensive and commercially grounded perspective on gender-intelligent banking. It offers evidence-driven insights to help institutions unleash long-term growth and strengthen business performance through a more informed and nuanced understanding of women customers.
Our new report is based on surveys with 400 microentrepreneurs, including both platformed digital users and unplatformed traditional businesses in urban and rural areas. The analysis reveals sharp contrasts in credit behavior, income patterns, and digital engagement. Gender and location strongly influence borrowing decisions, use of technology, and earnings. Yet, some findings are unexpected: Digital access does not always boost income, while women are often more independent in their use of technology. These patterns offer intriguing clues, which we explore in more detail in the full report.
Funds for climate adaptation in the public sector are increasingly shrinking, which raises the question: How do we mobilize private finance for adaptation today? At MSC, we are clear that an immense opportunity lies in the delivery of adaptation finance to micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the agriculture and allied sectors. These MSMEs are already served by banks, microfinance institutions (MFIs), cooperatives, and mobile money providers—and this is where scale is possible right now.
The 2025 Findex data paints a stark picture, but also presents a clear path forward. In low-income countries, 35% of adults report experiencing a natural disaster or extreme weather event in the past three years. The poorest 40% are about one-third more likely than the better-off to be hit. Moreover, among those affected, large majorities report losing income or assets.
At the same time, about 75% of adults in low- and moderate-income economies have an account with a bank, microfinance institution (MFI), cooperative, or mobile money provider. While the pathways to reach people already exist, the need for financial services is high and unequal.
MSC’s work for CGAP in cyclone-hit Khulna shows how climate events have steadily eroded the Aman rice cycle. Delayed monsoon and heat stress fuel pest outbreaks, heavy downpours flatten seedlings, cyclonic storm surges push saline water onto fields, while prolonged flooding prevents drying and storage. This increases input costs and squeezes profits.
Affected households then must stitch together informal and formal finance. They are forced to borrow, draw down savings, and resort to other coping measures to ride out successive shocks to the area’s most valuable crop.
Extreme climate events are affecting FSPs’ portfolios
Across Bangladesh, India, and Uganda, one pattern is hard to miss: Repayments slip when extreme climate events occur. Our work with an MFI in Africa revealed that climate shocks hit roughly a quarter of clients, and as a result, the 30-day portfolio-at-risk (PAR30) increased by about 0.5–1.0%. When we look forward, local drought projections imply income reductions of 15–20%, which is sufficient to add a further 1.2–1.6% to PAR30 unless product design and restructuring rules change.
Similarly, data from Basic Unit for Resources and Opportunities of Bangladesh (show how PAR rises after each extreme climate event in high-risk districts, such as Tangail, Rangpur, Satkhira, and Cox’s Bazar. Climate is no longer just an obligatory corporate social responsibility talking point. Today, it affects the profit and loss of financial service providers.
As a result, we are beginning to see financial service providers withdraw from or limit lending to climate-affected communities. And that is where MSC’s Repurpose–Rejig–Reinvent (3Rs) framework comes into play.
What can inclusive financial service providers (IFSPs) do?
A handful of IFSPs are modifying their product suites using MSC’s 3Rs framework to respond to climate change-induced events in both Asia and Africa. In the following sections, we examine two such instances:
BURO Bangladesh is moving beyond relief by applying a 3Rs strategy to make its products even more climate-responsive:
Repurpose: Through this part of the strategy, BURO will steer existing products toward adaptation and resilience. It will reorient staff, and thus communications and marketing, around clear climate use cases for its existing products. It will also actively use income-generation loans to finance climate-resilient seeds and inputs.
Rejig: BURO will use this part of the strategy to tweak loan structures and operations to fit climate realities, including season-aligned repayment schedules, and introduce the flexibility to allow temporary pauses or top-ups after verified shocks. It will also use the rejig part of the strategy to establish early-warning standard operating procedures, supported by MIS tags to enable branches to act quickly and consistently. This will improve BURO’s business efficiency.
Reinvent: BURO will use this component to develop, test, and launch purpose-built, climate-focused offerings. These would include pre-approved disaster loans, climate emergency savings accounts, climate-smart agriculture loans, and bundled parametric insurance. These products will be designed specifically to help households prepare for shocks and recover from them. They will be part of BURO’s ongoing business transformation endeavor to future-proof the organization.
BURO will enhance customer climate resilience in two phases. Phase 1 (6–12 months) will focus on repurposing and foundational rejigs, while phase 2 (1–2 years) will develop and scale new products and partnerships.
BURO believes that this approach will enable it to significantly enhance its impact by providing its clients with faster access to more flexible funds. This is expected to result in steadier incomes and fewer distress sales among clients, alongside a more resilient portfolio, clearer risk visibility, and even higher customer loyalty.
Case 2: MSC’s engagement with four Indian MFIs on climate-smart agriculture products
As part of an IDH-supported project, MSC identified climate-smart agriculture financing opportunities for IFSPs in India based on an analysis of their current product portfolio.
Currently, MSC is working with four MFIs in India on an ISEF-supported project to repurpose, rejig, and reinvent their product suite to support climate-smart agriculture (CSA).
Repurpose: This component seeks to reorient the IFSPs’ existing loans toward CSA. Income-generation loans are now being extended beyond the traditional livestock to finance poultry farms and aquaculture, with additional rapid top-ups to respond to seasonal needs. As part of this component, working-capital loans will be explicitly promoted for sustainable agriculture enterprises. In addition, the IFSP’s consumer durable credit products will include loans for smartphones bundled with crop-advisory services, which would turn the handset into a decision-making tool on the farm.
Rejig: This component seeks to tune product terms to fit CSA growth. Income-generation loans are being restructured into small-business loans, with larger ticket sizes and increased tenors of up to three years to support larger investments. As part of the rejig component, working capital limits are increased to provide farmers with more flexibility to purchase resilient inputs when they are needed most.
These small yet precise changes unlock climate value through faster adoption, better timing, and smarter decisions, yet keep underwriting and operations familiar for staff and clients.
Reinventing products is, of course, the most challenging and requires careful human-centered design and thorough pilot testing. We are focusing on three climate-smart agriculture loans under this part of the 3R strategy.
CSA asset loans will provide credit for on-farm technologies that boost resilience and efficiency, with increased loan amounts depending on the assets being acquired. These increased loan sizes will be matched by increased tenures of two to three years and will be repaid via monthly instalments.
Climate-resilient crop loans will offer a revolving credit facility that backs farmers who grow these crops. These relatively small loans will be offered with a tenure of two years, repayable in semi-annual instalments to coincide with crop cycles.
Livestock insurance will provide protection against financial loss from the death or illness of livestock, such as goats and pigs. The sum insured will be the lower of the market value or the loan outstanding, for a premium of just 4% of the assured sum.
These reinvented products are more complex and riskier than those that are simply repurposed or rejigged. As a result, the MFIs are likely to seek blended finance to de-risk their delivery. Nonetheless, together, these “reinvent” products finance the hardware and working cycles, while providing the risk transfer that farmers need to adapt. Most importantly, they slot neatly alongside the MFIs’ existing microcredit operations.
The products also offer phased, seasonal, purpose-tied loans for agriculture with repayment schedules that match cash cycles. These are further strengthened by the addition of exception rules for disaster periods, such as automatic grace periods, remote guarantors or KYC, and branch-level liquidity buffers, so staff do not ration financing in the face of climate events.
The way ahead
The 3R framework aligns directly with global guidance on climate-resilient financial inclusion and climate-smart agriculture. It offers MFIs and banks a practical pathway to originate millions of small, standardized, adaptation-linked receivables that private capital can finance. Poor households worldwide are already being compelled to adapt to the effects of climate change. In response, IFSPs should adopt the 3Rs framework to guide their product response to support their clients’ adaptation and resilience.
Over the past 50 years, we have built a financial services infrastructure designed to reach and serve these vulnerable communities. We should use climate funds to de-risk their operations, repurpose, rejig, and reinvent their products, and crowd in the USD 1.5 trillion capital that this remarkable infrastructure manages. We simply cannot afford to miss this opportunity.
We met Masum Sheikh in Khulna, Bangladesh, where he sells sugarcane juice. Years ago, he lived peacefully in his native village of Koyra. There, he would grow rice and fish. Then came the fateful month of May 2009, when Cyclone Aila overran embankments, devastated his home, and inundated his fields with saline water. A desperate Masum withdrew his small savings from an informal group to cover essentials. He then borrowed from a microfinance institution (MFI) to repair his house and relocate his family to Chittagong.
In the new town, Masum’s wife and daughter worked in the garment industry, while he sold sugarcane juice. After four years, he used savings and another MFI loan to return to Khulna, where he opened a juice stall. When a bridge construction work started at his usual selling spot, he had to shut down his stall and work as a laborer at the construction site. Eventually, he moved back to Koyra to restart his fish farming business with the savings. Yet, bad luck followed him as Cyclone Amphan and later monsoon floods during COVID-19 in 2020 wiped out his stocks. Masum was compelled to take a loan from another MFI, ASA-Bangladesh, to restock, which he repaid and borrowed again to relaunch his juice stand in Khulna.
Masum’s story illustrates how low-income households effectively juggle informal savings and formal finance to adapt and rebuild, a strategy vital to climate resilience in a country like Bangladesh, where climate disasters, such as flooding, droughts, erratic rainfall, and cyclones, have become more frequent and destructive. For millions of vulnerable families, not unlike Masum’s, MFIs have emerged as a savior. However, much of this support remains reactive. MFIs focus on how to help communities recover from disasters rather than prepare them to withstand future shocks. Yet, these reactive measures do not enable true climate resilience.
The previous blog in this series, titled “From reactive coping to adaptive resilience amid climate change,” explored how climate-affected households adjust their financial behaviors during crises and how MFIs, such as BURO Bangladesh, step in with emergency support. This second part asks what the stakeholders can do differently to make resilience a central part of inclusive finance.
What inclusive finance providers can do
Make climate risk a credit variable
MFIs in Bangladesh should consider climate exposure as a key factor in lending decisions. Lenders can integrate hazard maps, rainfall patterns, and local vulnerability data into loan appraisals. They can design credit terms aligned with seasonal realities and regional risks. Global experience shows that this approach is both possible and practical. Global frameworks, such as the International Finance Corporation’s Climate Risk in Credit Model, help institutions link exposure to credit pricing.
Kenyan financial institutions use climate-smart credit scoring for smallholder farmers based on satellite rainfall data. NABARD in India incorporates climate-resilient appraisal frameworks into agricultural lending. Financial service providers in Bangladesh can draw from these models and strengthen their risk management systems, reduce portfolio exposure, and attract new streams of climate-aligned investment.
Shift to early-action finance
Although lending after a disaster helps families rebuild, financial lending before a disaster makes them resilient. MFIs in Bangladesh can pre-approve contingent credit lines that activate automatically when early-warning thresholds are triggered. Evidence from the World Food Programme’s Anticipatory Action Programme underscores how anticipatory lending has helped communities in 44 countries access funds before disasters. These measures reduced recovery costs and protected food security for more than 6.2 million lives.
Multiple cases from across the globe have shown that every dollar invested in pre-financing can save up to USD 34 in recovery costs. In Bangladesh, BRAC’s anticipatory loan pilot produced similar results. Atram.ai built on this momentum and is working to scale such anticipatory finance models through AI-driven tools. These tools provide early warnings and actionable financial triggers for MSMEs to help them protect their businesses before climate shocks strike.
Bundle simple, transparent insurance
For low-income households around the world, insurance coverage remains shockingly low. The Microinsurance Network’s 2023 Landscape Report found that while 330 million people worldwide have inclusive insurance, nearly 88% of vulnerable households remain uncovered.
In Kenya, ACRE Africa provides weather-index insurance linked to farm loans and mobile payouts, which reach more than 2 million farmers. In the Philippines, CARD MRI’s member-owned microinsurance network covers 32 million. Bangladesh MFIs can likewise partner with insurers and bundle index-based microinsurance with their savings and loan products.
Move from branch files to bankable pools
Aggregation will be essential to scale climate adaptation finance. MFIs can pool thousands of microloans into climate receivable portfolios. This model has already been tested through the Incofin Climate-Smart Microfinance Fund, which combines adaptive lending and insurance to attract blended capital. Development finance institutions and impact investors can provide first-loss guarantees, while insurance companies can add protection layers that cover large-scale or widespread disasters, which affect many borrowers at once.
Such blended finance instruments could crowd in commercial money without compromising client protection. In Bangladesh, similar financing structures could help institutions, such as BURO, channel funds into resilient agriculture, house elevation, and livelihood diversification of their clients.
What regulators and funders can do
Enable innovation through regulatory sandboxes
Innovation thrives when experimentation is encouraged. Several countries now use regulatory sandboxes to test climate-focused financial innovations. For example, the Reserve Bank of Fiji introduced a parametric insurance product under the UNCDF’s Pacific Insurance and Climate Adaptation Programme. The Bangladesh Bank could introduce similar climate finance sandboxes where MFIs can test out new ideas, such as parametric insurance or anticipatory credit, under simplified compliance.
Provide pre-arranged liquidity and risk-sharing
Speedy solutions can make all the difference in moments of crisis. Global initiatives show how risk-sharing and early-action finance can keep institutions afloat during climate shocks. For instance, KfW’s InsuResilience Investment Fund offers a USD 10-million contingent credit line that releases liquidity for MFIs after disasters. The IFC’s Risk Sharing Facility provides first-loss guarantees to de-risk climate lending. The Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS) initiative supports early-warning infrastructure that links forecasts to risk-informed financial responses. Such facilities enable MFIs to continue lending even when disaster strikes, which ensures clients are not left waiting for relief.
In Bangladesh, DFIs and climate funds can accelerate crisis response if they establish standby liquidity facilities, first-loss guarantees, and reinsurance mechanisms tied to early warning systems.
Standardize data and metrics
The UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2023 emphasizes that consistent, comparable data is essential to develop measurable climate resilience and mobilize private capital for adaptation at scale. Funders can strengthen accountability and investor confidence if they help MFIs adopt standardized metrics, such as assets protected, negative coping mechanisms avoided, or loans disbursed before impact.
Link national policy to local delivery
Climate finance strategies work best when policy supports practice. Therefore, the country’s MFIs should align national frameworks, such as Bangladesh’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), with grassroots implementation to ensure adaptation resources reach the communities most at risk. Coordinated action between regulators, donors, and MFIs can ensure that national ambitions translate into local resilience outcomes.
A shared responsibility for the future
The shift from reaction to resilience cannot rest on any single actor. MFIs, such as BURO Bangladesh, have shown agility and empathy in their response to crises. However, they need support to help clients anticipate and adapt to climate challenges. Regulators must provide the enabling frameworks, while funders and investors must inject catalytic capital and share risk.
Players in Bangladesh’s inclusive finance ecosystem must collaborate to anticipate risks, reduce losses, and shift from short-term coping to long-term adaptation. MFIs, regulators, and funders must shift their focus and work collaboratively to support devastated families before the next crisis hits.
Effective climate resilience will require triangulated collaboration, where MFIs deliver access; regulators create guardrails, and funders bring scale. Each of these actors can only manage symptoms if they work in isolation. Yet, together, they can transform Bangladesh’s vast inclusive-finance network into an engine of climate adaptation that can drive a safety net to protect livelihoods, strengthen communities, and empower the people most exposed to a changing climate.
Masum Sheikh and millions of climate-struck people like him in Bangladesh deserve finance networks that can shield them from climate disasters.
Bangladesh stands at the frontline of climate change. Cyclones, floods, droughts, erratic rainfall, and salinity intrusion are no longer rare events but recurring realities that erode livelihoods and threaten financial security.
For low-income households, climate shocks affect both livelihoods and the financial resources that support them. Each disaster disrupts the fragile balance of people’s daily lives as they save, borrow, and repay funds. The inclusive finance sector plays a vital role in this struggle. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) must now take up a dual role. They must extend credit to rural communities to support their livelihoods and help them withstand the climate stresses that erode them.
MicroSave Consulting (MSC) conducted research with BURO Bangladesh on its clients in four of the country’s most climate-exposed districts. The study reveals how households adjust their financial behaviors during crises, and how MFIs respond.
Our research highlights that households adopt distinct financial behaviors under climate stress:
Savings as the first lifeline: Families withdraw deposits to cover food, health costs, or repairs. Households consume their savings or resort to distress selling of their assets to meet their basic needs during climate events.
Loan demand collapses, then rebounds: During disasters, borrowing slows as incomes falter. Once the waters recede or markets reopen, the demand for loans surges. For instance, during April, households grapple with droughts and nor’westers that disrupt agricultural cycles, while in July and August, recurring heavy rainfall and floods frequently damage crops and homes, triggering a spike in loan requests for recovery and rebuilding.
Informal credit fills gaps: With savings depleted and formal loans delayed, many households are forced to turn to informal lenders, often at punishing rates that prolong debt cycles.
Women face higher barriers: Limited mobility, caution on the part of lenders, and caregiving duties restrict women’s access to credit when they need it most.
These behaviors align with the BRACED 3A framework, which defines resilience as people’s ability to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to climate shocks. Our study showed how households use a variety, and often a combination, of these strategies. See the figure below.
Yet, these strategies remain fragile without timely finance. Delayed liquidity undermines anticipation, weakens absorption, and postpones adaptation. If households’ coping strategies are weak without financial support, MFIs play a crucial role in shaping resilience. BURO Bangladesh’s practices illustrate a balance of caution and compassion:
Repayment deferrals and paused disbursements protect liquidity and prevent defaults.
Emergency “hand” loans, small and rapidly disbursed, are meant to cover essentials. However, the maximum loan amounts are often inadequate to meet the demand.
Flexible savings withdrawals from both BURO’s open-access current accounts and, in the face of disaster, even from restricted contractual savings schemes, prioritize survival and recovery over rules.
Operational shifts involve staff pivoting to relief activities and client support in disaster-hit areas.
These measures provide vital safety nets. Yet, they are often reactive and kick in after the damage has already been done. They enable survival, but rarely long-term adaptation. BURO’s approach reflects the typical reactive pattern across Bangladesh.
MFIs operate under immense constraints when disasters strike. BURO notes that after disasters, many households seek loans from multiple providers, which raises the risk of over indebtedness. BURO slows disbursements to prevent this and focuses on capacity-based lending, even as the demand for credit surges—not always for productive use but often for basic survival. Repayment deferrals offer clients breathing space, but delay cash flows, increase provisioning, and, in some cases, lead to loan losses.
Operational realities compound these financial strains. Flooded roads and damaged infrastructure limit access to branches and the mobility of field officers, while power cuts disrupt day to day branch operations and service delivery in drought-prone areas. The burden falls especially hard on women, who face health risks and must shoulder caregiving duties, which reduce their ability to engage financially during crises. These experiences underscore the delicate balance MFIs must navigate as they safeguard clients’ survival and protect their own sustainability. These barriers highlight a critical gap: While MFIs support households to absorb shocks, they are not yet adequately enabling them to anticipate or adapt effectively.
Global experience offers powerful lessons for Bangladesh on how inclusive finance can move from reactive relief to proactive resilience. One major gap is insurance. The Microinsurance Network’s 2023 report shows that while approximately 330 million people across 36 countries now have some form of inclusive insurance, nearly 88% of vulnerable households worldwide still lack coverage.
The InsuResilience Global Partnership reported that 319 million people benefitted from climate and disaster risk finance in 2024, with micro-level beneficiaries in low-income countries almost doubling year on year. This momentum could be harnessed more effectively in Bangladesh through MFIs and their agent networks to extend protection to those most exposed.
Global evidence also shows that anticipatory action is most effective when finance is pre-arranged and automatically triggered. The International Federation of Red Cross has shown how pre-agreed thresholds unlock funds before disasters strike. BRAC tested this approach in Bangladesh, where households pre-approved for emergency loans maintained 9% higher consumption levels after floods than those without access. New initiatives, such as Atram.ai, are further advancing this logic through AI-driven models that trigger financing for households and small businesses before climate shocks occur.
Finally, capital must be scaled to create systemic resilience. Small, fragmented loans need to be aggregated into investable pools. Regulators and supervisors are starting to recognize this: The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) has urged the integration of climate adaptation into financial supervision to create structures that allow microloans to be bundled, de-risked, and financed at scale. Such approaches could help bridge the protection gap and simultaneously give MFIs the resources they need to serve clients in increasingly volatile conditions. The message is clear: Proactive finance reduces losses and strengthens resilience far more than reactive aid.
The experience of BURO Bangladesh and its clients shows both resilience and strain. Families often rely on savings, loans, and informal networks to make ends meet. Meanwhile, MFIs provide lifelines through repayment deferrals, emergency loans, and flexible withdrawals. Yet, these measures remain mostly reactive and help people survive, rather than preparing them for the future.
As climate shocks intensify, the current approaches will no longer be enough. Inclusive finance in Bangladesh must move beyond coping to strengthen households’ ability to anticipate, absorb, and adapt. The next blog ‘How Bangladesh can shift from reaction to resilience in climate finance for vulnerable communities’ in this series will ask what MFIs, regulators, and development partners must do to shift from reactive responses to systemic resilience, and what tools can help close the adaptation finance gap.
This site uses cookies, by continuing your navigation, you agree with our Cookie Policy.
