According to a study by the FinMark Trust, South Africa is the only SADC country where females are more financially included than their male counterparts – in the remainder of the region, 6% more men than women have bank accounts.
‘The fact that more women than men are financially included in South Africa is mainly explicable based on more women being grant recipients – 42% of adult women are social grant recipients compared to only 13% of men,’ Dr Kingstone Mutsonziwa, co-author of the paper and head of information and research at the FinMark Trust, told Moneyweb.
The study also found that more South African women than men hold additional accounts at other formal financial institutions. However, gender disparity still remains (at 3%) in terms of access to credit through formal financial institutions, although both parties have equal access to informal credit.
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