Driving Bangladesh's cashless progress

In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen notes, that “the agency of women is one of the most neglected areas in development economics, and yet it is central to removing inequities that restrain development.” For Bangladesh, the story has been mixed as women have long powered its’ economic transformation, from garment factories to agricultural labour to home-based production, yet the majority remain locked out of formal financial systems weaking their formal financial agency. Moreover, at present, this is not merely a gender centric backwardness, rather it is a binding constraint on Bangladesh’s broader approach to inclusive economic and social development. Financial exclusion of women directly suppresses the productive capacity of more than a third of the country’s workforce, and addressing it is one of the most tractable levers Bangladesh has for accelerating national economic and social progress.

At the heart of the problem is the divergence between women’s participation in the economy and their actual control over financial capital. Women make up approximately 34 per cent of Bangladesh’s total labour force, yet their economic contributions are severely constrained by exclusion from formal finance. According to the Global Findex 2025, there is a 20-percentage point gender gap in financial account ownership in Bangladesh, more than four times the global average. Bangladesh Bank’s own Financial Inclusion Report for 2023 confirms how this plays out on the ground: 62.86 per cent of men access formal financial services, compared to just 43.46 per cent of women.  That gap is not a marginal disparity. It means that for nearly six in ten women in the labour force, earnings flow in and out without any of the protections, savings mechanisms, or credit pathways that formal finance provides. Research consistently shows that when women do control their own earnings, households invest measurably more in health, education, and nutrition, and women are significantly better placed to absorb economic shocks. Financial exclusion forecloses these outcomes before they can begin.

The barriers sustaining this exclusion are structural and often mutually reinforcing. Approximately 68 per cent of women in Bangladesh own a mobile phone compared to 85 per cent of men, a 17-percentage point gap that directly limits access to digital financial services at a time when mobile infrastructure is the primary vehicle for financial inclusion. Beyond device access, women face greater difficulty obtaining the documentation needed to open accounts, as the practical requirements like travelling to home districts, taking family permission fall disproportionately hard on women who carry the majority of household and childcare responsibilities. Social norms impose further costs: women frequently face pressure, and sometimes outright coercion, to hand over their earnings to husbands or in-laws, a dynamic that makes financial autonomy difficult to sustain even when accounts exist.

These structural realities are precisely why well-designed digital financial infrastructure represents a genuine opportunity, not simply a technological upgrade. An account held in a woman’s own name, secured by her own PIN or biometric, offers more agency by enhancing the protection that cash cannot. Cash can be seized the moment wages are paid. A properly owned digital account cannot be emptied by a third party without the woman’s own authentication. The operative phase is properly owned, the account must be hers in practice, on a device she controls, with credentials no one else shares. Where those conditions are met, wage digitisation directly strengthens a woman’s position within the household economy. Where they are not, it changes the form of exclusion without changing its substance.

Bangladesh’s mobile financial services sector has expanded significantly, standing at 238 million registered accounts by 2024. This infrastructure represents a genuine foundation for inclusion. Yet the distribution of accounts within that growth tells a more troubling story. Women’s share of total MFS accounts fell from 48 per cent in 2019 to 42 per cent in 2023, even as the overall number of accounts more than doubled over the same period.  The MFS sector is growing fastest among men, and the gender gap within it is widening rather than closing. Rapid infrastructure growth that does not account for the specific barrier women face does not produce actual inclusion; it produces a larger version of the same exclusion.

However, evidence from the Sarathi financial literacy project, run by Swisscontact in partnership with commercial banks and garment factories across Bangladesh, demonstrates that these barriers are not fixed. Targeted financial literacy training, delivered in ways accessible to women with low levels of formal education and no prior experience with digital systems, produced meaningful improvements in actual account uptake and sustained usage among RMG workers.  The lesson is that women do not need to be persuaded of the value of financial services; they need the knowledge, the confidence, and the practical conditions to use them without losing control over what they earn.

Consequently, three core shifts are needed to empower women’s real agency within the financial space – that the present data on financial inclusion often cannot capture. First: financial literacy cannot remain a standalone intervention delivered to individuals, it needs to be embedded into the infrastructure itself, through employers, unions, and the NGO networks that already have women’s trust at the community level. Second: wage digitisation, which has shown real results in the formal garment sector, needs to be extended through deliberate policy to the informal economy, where most working women actually are domestic workers, agricultural labourers, and small traders who currently have no equivalent pathway into formal finance; and has limited control over their finances. Third: regulatory framework needs to catch up with the reality of how women experience financial coercion; when a woman’s account is opened in her name but accessed by a husband or employer, inclusion figures look better while nothing changes on the ground. Protecting genuine account ownership, through awareness of rights, accessible grievance mechanisms, and accountability for financial institutions, is the missing policy layer that data alone cannot substitute.

On the whole, Bangladesh has succeeded in building the scaffolding of financial inclusion: networks have expanded, platforms have proliferated, and access points have multiplied. Yet inclusion, in its truest sense, remains limited. The challenge before us is no longer one of infrastructure, but of transformation. It calls for coordinated action across policy, institutions, and social norms to ensure that access becomes meaningful.  The harder work lies in making financial systems genuinely accessible and responsive to women, so that they are not merely participants at the margins, but agents at the centre of economic life. Only then can financial inclusion fulfil its promise: not as an end in itself, but as a pathway to deeper agency for women and a more equitable development trajectory.

Dr. Ashikur Rahman is the Principal Economist at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) and Samin Yasar Anabil is a Research Associate at PRI.