This WE Talks is in collaboration with the Financial Alliance for Women

Accelerating Migration to Digital Finance for WSMEs

When: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 | 09:00-10:00AM EDT / 1:00-2:00PM GMT
Where: WebEx Webinar

All over the world, we are seeing the massive impact the coronavirus crisis is having on small and medium-sized businesses, with women-led SMEs among the hardest hit. The coronavirus outbreak is impacting both financial markets and consumer behavior. As firms and consumers move their businesses online, the COVID-19 crisis could be an important inflection point for women entrepreneurs to migrate to mobile banking and other fintech services. This WE Talks session will look at the instruments and policies that can be developed to make the digital financial transition for women-led SMEs (WSMEs) easier.

This webinar, organized by Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) and the Financial Alliance for Women, will have a special focus on Kenya where the Central Bank recently cut transaction fees and other tariffs for mobile money to encourage people to use digital payments instead of hard currency. This type of decision could also boost digital finance ecosystems for WSMEs in the longer run.

This online discussion is the second WE Talks, a series of webinars to share real-time experiences and best practices for supporting women entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 crisis.

Who:

On May 19th, We-Fi and the Financial Alliance for Women are joining forces to discuss how the financial services ecosystem is supporting women entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 crisis. This webinar is intended for representatives of donor organizations, private sector, NGOs, and development finance institutions and provides insights from organizations designing and implementing concrete solutions for women during this time of crisis.

Experts will explore:

• The impact of Covid-19 across the Kenyan economy, the financial system, and women-led SMEs in particular;
• The policies that can be developed by regulators in the financial sector to ease the digital financial transition for WMSEs;
• How investors and development finance institutions can support the move to digital financial services;
• Can COVID-19 related measures encouraging the transition to digital finance support the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem in the long term?