With improved access to finance and skills, women-owned businesses could potentially generate over 150 million jobs by 2030 (UGRO Capital) and create one in every three jobs for women (Kinara...
With improved access to finance and skills, women-owned businesses could potentially generate over 150 million jobs by 2030 (UGRO Capital) and create one in every three jobs for women (Kinara Capital). Despite their economic contribution, women’s enterprises face a credit gap of 70.37% (International Finance Observation), with 90% (Observer Research Foundation) relying on informal funding sources. Many are at the edge of growth but lack catalytic capital, advisory support, and market access to move to the next level. Structural barriers such as the gender digital divide – lower smartphone ownership, heightened fear of digital fraud, limited digital literacy, and the risk of algorithmic bias in digital underwriting – further restrict access. Targeted graduation programmes – combining right-sized credit, mentoring, digital enablement, and supply chain linkages – are essential to unlock productivity at scale.
These constraints are not ambition problems or repayment discipline. It is a system design problem: Financial models were not built around the realities of women’s economic lives. Time poverty, mobility constraints, traditional branch-centric, documentation-heavy lending systems often fail to serve women efficiently. These gaps are not only structural inefficiencies. With emerging climate risks, these gaps could exacerbate into hefty financial risks.
The climate crisis is no longer an environmental debate; it is one of the most material credit risks in emerging markets. Asia recently recorded its warmest year on record, with temperatures more than one degree Celsius above long-term averages. India has experienced increasingly erratic monsoons, prolonged heatwaves, early rainfall onset in some regions, and delayed precipitation in others.
Climate and financial vulnerability go hand in hand. Extreme heat, floods, erratic rainfall, and supply chain disruptions directly affect the sectors where women are concentrated – agriculture, livestock, food processing, textiles, and micro-manufacturing. These shocks wipe out crops, inventory, equipment, livestock, and working capital – the very foundations of loan repayment. When borrowers cannot store savings safely, cannot receive emergency funds quickly, and cannot rebuild income streams after extreme weather events, their repayment capacity erodes – and lenders’ portfolios are exposed.
Credit designed with climate resilience in mind – such as financing for irrigation, drought-resistant seeds, diversified production assets, energy-efficient equipment, working capital buffers, and bundled savings and insurance – directly stabilises cashflows. When borrowers can adapt and continue generating income after shocks, default risk declines.
Many women-led businesses may have little to no collateral, digital financial footprints, formal credit histories, or formal business records, which makes it harder for financial services providers (FSPs) to underwrite them using conventional models. As a result, women are often labeled “high risk” because they are “thin file” customers. In reality, traditional underwriting models ignore the environmental and seasonal realities that shape their income patterns. Climate-smart underwriting is therefore not concessional lending. It is more precise lending. Incorporating new data sources – rainfall variability, income seasonality, utility usage patterns, crop cycles – provides a more accurate assessment of repayment capacity. This reduces both under-lending to capable women and over-indebtedness linked to climate-driven income volatility.
Women entrepreneurs are already adapting. Across rural India, women are altering crops, diversifying income streams, adjusting production schedules, investing in storage, and shifting supply sources to cope with weather volatility. This latent demand must now reflect in credit products to match adaptation strategies: Flexible repayment structures that align with seasonal income; fast, low-ticket climate emergency loans; bundled insurance; and working capital and financing for climate-resilient technologies.
This climate-smart, gender-intentional design must also be applied to on-ground structural transitions and delivery channels. Integrating women entrepreneurs into stronger and women-led supply chains – particularly in agriculture and agri-allied sectors – further enhances stability. When women have voice and agency as decision-makers in agricultural enterprises – particularly around crop diversification, water management, and clean technology adoption – adaptation outcomes and enterprise performance both improve.
Women’s World Banking’s programme with the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) – called the Prayaas Individual Enterprise Scheme – has demonstrated that local women's networks, such as Community-Based Organisations of Self-Help Groups, can successfully identify, assess, and deliver loans. Institutions like these that can aggregate women, facilitate their access to credit, integrate them into stronger value and supply chains, and play the critical intermediation role will simplify women’s access to credit amid climate shocks.
Gender-disaggregated data is equally critical as it offers a complementary data path to understand women’s customer behaviour, strengthen credit decision-making, identify and mitigate algorithmic bias, and build climate-smart financial solutions, such as affordable insurance and green enterprise loans.
Climate shocks do not hit borrowers one by one. They hit regions simultaneously. Correlated income losses translate into correlated default risk. Financial institutions that ignore climate exposure in vulnerable segments are building fragile portfolios. Globally, financial regulators are integrating climate risk into supervisory frameworks. Climate-smart lending is therefore not a sustainability gesture – it is regulatory alignment and forward-looking risk governance. Concessional capital and blended finance models can de-risk this transition. By combining public, philanthropic, and private capital, blended structures can lower the cost of capital, absorb first-loss risk, and crowd in commercial lenders. This is particularly critical for women-owned enterprises operating at small scale.
Women MSMEs are essential actors in a sustainable climate transition and in building a climate-resilient economy. What is needed now is the willingness to redesign systems to see, serve, and scale this underserved market segment – because the risk of continued exclusion is far greater than the cost of inclusion, and this is a market ready to scale.
This article is authored by SS Bhat, CEO, Friends of Women’s World Banking (India) and Swati Chowdhary, vice president, (Network and Development), South Asia, Women’s World Banking.