Scaling female agent networks (2024-2027)

• Mar 24, 2026
• 1 min

Despite global evidence that female agents drive higher trust, attract more women customers, and often outperform male counterparts on key service indicators, female agents are significantly underrepresented in global agent networks. They actively face structural barriers such as limited access to capital, weak institutional use of gender data, and restrictive social norms, which further constrain their recruitment, retention, and business viability.

This project was designed to address these systemic bottlenecks and accelerate progress toward closing the gender gap in active use of digital financial services. 

Through this project, MSC is working to scale proven models that recruit, support, and sustain female CICO agents in Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Indonesia by addressing systemic bottlenecks. The project focuses on three pillars:

• designing and scaling gender-intentional liquidity and working capital solutions for female agents, including credit scoring tools and tailored loan products;  

• supporting financial service providers to collect and use gender-disaggregated data (GDD) to improve recruitment, segmentation, performance management, and retention; and  

• Integrating social and gender norms into recruitment, onboarding, training, and grievance redressal systems.

The project combines technical assistance, pilot scale-up support, monitoring and evaluation, and ecosystem-level knowledge dissemination for key financial service providers across the three markets.

The project aims to directly impact approximately 350,000 female agents by improving access to capital, increasing revenues, strengthening retention, and reducing dormancy. In turn, it is expected to benefit at least 1 million low-income women customers by expanding access to trusted, gender-sensitive financial services through strengthened agent networks.

The Gates Foundation commissioned the project.