ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the debates around financial inclusion and gender equality as two interconnected aspects of the international development project. It examines how the rules introduced during colonialism contributed to disproportionately excluding women from formal finance. It then analyses the relationship between financial inclusion and gender equality at different stages of the development project, looking in particular at the progressive shift from microcredit to microfinance to universal financial inclusion, and the recent turn to digital financial inclusion. It argues that the rhetoric of inclusion is used to reframe, rather than challenge, the gendered exclusions produced by colonialism and problematic development discourses and interventions, while digital financial inclusion itself has created new avenues for extending financial instruments, logics and profits without challenging the gendered socio-economic disadvantages that cause financial exclusion.
