Digital Financial Inclusion and Women’s Economic Empowerment in Northern Ghana: The Experience of Rural Women in the Shea Value Chain

Discrimination and heightened vulnerability as a result of unequal gender roles permeate the most fundamental aspects of freedom, consequently influencing the degree of financial inclusion women can attain. As a result, women and girls continue to have lower levels of economic power, asset ownership, education, and income, with detrimental implications for the welfare outcomes of women. Women’s financial inclusion has proven to be a driver to achieving many of the sustainable development goals 1–5, 8, 9, 10, and 16. Women’s access to and use of appropriate financial services such as payments, savings, credit, and insurance holds a strong promise to facilitate women’s socioeconomic empowerment. However, the empirical literature has failed to bear this out, as existing attempts remain few and inconclusive, calling for a within-country enquiry. This chapter examines how access and usage of financial services proxied by mobile money affects women empowerment for female farmers in the shea value chain in Northern Ghana. Results from the instrumental variable Probit estimation technique show that access to financial services and usage of financial services enhance women’s empowerment in general, and also four domains of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Recommendations are appropriately supplied for policy and practice.