FSD UgandaFrom participation to inclusion: building financial systems that work for women and youth
Expanding access to finance for women and youth requires more than credit. It requires financial systems designed around how people actually live, earn, save, and manage risk.
In 2025, FSD Uganda’s gender equity work focused on understanding and addressing the structural barriers that continue to exclude women, youth, and other underserved groups from meaningful financial participation. Across programmes such as Stimulating Agribusiness for Youth Employment (SAYE) project and the Micro and Small Enterprise Recovery Fund (MSERF), the emphasis shifted from access alone to improving how financial systems respond to real market needs.
Understanding barriers in youth and women’s financial inclusion
Under the SAYE project, FSD Uganda commissioned a legal, policy, and regulatory diagnostic to assess whether Uganda’s financial inclusion framework adequately responds to the needs of young people, women, and persons with disabilities in agribusiness and MSMEs.
The findings were clear. Uganda’s financial inclusion policies are largely well designed and supportive, including the National Financial Inclusion Strategy, Financial Literacy Strategy, and National Payments Policy. The challenge lies less in policy design and more in implementation.
For women and youth in Busoga, exclusion is driven more by practical constraints than legal barriers: lack of collateral, high interest rates and transaction costs, rigid loan features, weak financial literacy, limited digital infrastructure, and low awareness of available opportunities. For young people below 18, delayed access to national IDs also limits account ownership and formal financial participation.
The study also highlighted that while women and youth are often specifically targeted in financial inclusion programmes, persons with disabilities are frequently included only by default rather than through intentional design.
These findings reinforce an important lesson: improving financial inclusion requires stronger execution, better product design, and more responsive delivery systems not simply more policies.
Strengthening institutions and market readiness
FSD Uganda also supported SACCOs and financial institutions to better respond to these realities.
A gender norms diagnostic across SACCOs in Busoga showed how social norms continue to shape women’s access to and use of financial services. Women often face limited decision-making power, lower asset ownership, and reduced visibility within financial institutions themselves.
This informed targeted capacity building for SACCO leadership and staff to strengthen women’s leadership, improve inclusive product design, and promote fairer service delivery models. The goal was not only better internal practices, but stronger institutions capable of serving women more effectively.
At ecosystem level, partnerships with banks, agri-hubs, and youth platforms also helped improve financial readiness and strengthen the link between informal groups and formal financial institutions, an important step in moving from financial access to sustained usage.
Moving from isolated interventions to system change
Under the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works strategy, FSD Uganda continued to steward the Community of Practice (CoP) on Inclusive Finance as a coordination platform for inclusive finance.
The CoP responds to a common challenge across youth employment programmes: many young people especially young women, refugees, persons with disabilities, and early-stage entrepreneurs receive enterprise support but remain excluded from financial systems that are not designed for their realities.
Financial products often require formal collateral, long operating histories, and repayment structures that do not reflect informal businesses or startups. Financial literacy efforts are often fragmented and fail to drive lasting behavioural change.
The CoP brought together programme partners, financial institutions, and ecosystem actors to address these gaps collectively. Key areas included alternative credit scoring, digitisation of VSLAs, mobile-based financial literacy, startup financing models, and stronger access-to-finance measurement.
This work is helping shift the system from isolated interventions to a more deliberate financial inclusion architecture where programme design, financial products, and measurement work together.
Lessons from affirmative action in inclusive finance
In 2025, FSD Uganda also introduced an Affirmative Action approach under MSERF to address persistent regional inequities in access to finance.
The intervention recognised that standard due diligence requirements were unintentionally excluding Tier IV institutions in Northern and Eastern Uganda areas where financial exclusion is often highest.
Rather than treating this as a liquidity problem, FSD Uganda tested whether targeted institutional strengthening could prepare these institutions to sustainably absorb and manage capital.
The results were instructive. Capacity-building support improved reporting, governance awareness, and portfolio management. Some institutions recorded measurable progress, including improved portfolio recovery and stronger female membership growth.
However, the process also revealed a deeper reality: financial exclusion at this level is often an institutional problem before it becomes a financing problem. Weak governance, fragile loan books, and poor reporting systems cannot be solved through short-term capital injections alone.
The lesson was clear. Inclusion requires time, institutional readiness, and stronger foundations. Without that, liquidity alone creates risk rather than opportunity.
Looking ahead
These experiences continue to reinforce the same principle: financial inclusion for women and youth cannot be achieved through standalone interventions.
It requires systems that recognise lived realities, institutions that can serve excluded groups well, and financing models designed around trust, flexibility, and resilience.
FSD Uganda’s focus remains clear: not only expanding access to finance, but ensuring financial systems create meaningful and lasting economic opportunity for those historically left out.
