Egypt

Rural women can now individually and collectively track their personal savings and individual and group loans through the �Tahwisha� (�Savings�) mobile phone application. As of December 2024, the national Tahwisha programme has 186 active digital saving groups encompassing 240,692 women who have collectively saved EGP 2,300,280 (approx. USD 45,660). To reach this result, the Government of Egypt (GOE) developed and rolled out a dynamic innovative digital tool to promote banking and community-driven savings and lending for rural women. The app substitutes the tin boxes rural women used before to pool their savings under the classical version of Savings Groups. Since 2020, UN Women has partnered with the Government of Egypt�s national programme on women�s digital financial inclusion to develop Tahwisha. With UN Women�s technical and financial support, the �Tahwisha� mobile phone application was developed in 2021 and continues to be rolled out across the country. Hundreds of rural women who have been trained as formal banking agents under the Agricultural Bank of Egypt are now supporting these digital savings groups. With UN Women�s technical and financial support (including VSLA group formation, financial and digital literacy training, capacity development of community based trainers). This work builds on a previous UN Women, National Council for Women (NCW), Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) partnership, in which, by the end of the project, rural women had increased their personal savings by no less than 3 - 4 times and reported use of such savings as a buffer against hardships, such as illness and family loss of income. In addition, some women also started their microbusiness with the accumulated savings. UN Women�s contributions to the GOE�s national programme will eventually reach 160,000 women across 10 governorates by 2025. The goal of the nationally-led programme is to enable rural women � through their participation in women-led digital savings groups � to open bank accounts, access personal savings and micro-loans, increase their financial and digital literacy, advance greater economic engagement, and be integrated into the formal economy. This result will drive the achievement of SDG 5 and SDG 1 and overcome a significant structural barrier to equality (financial access).

39,345 rural women are now banked directly because of UN Women�s support to the development of digital mobile banking application �Tawisha�. Since 2020, UN Women has partnered with the Government of Egypt�s (GoE) national programme on women�s digital financial inclusion entitled Tawisha (�Savings�). Through this partnership, the GoE developed and rolled out a dynamic innovative digital mobile phone application to promote banking & community-driven savings & lending for rural women. The app substitutes for the tin box rural women used before to pool their savings under the classical version of Savings Groups. With this substation, women are now formally banked & all savings & lending are part of the formal banking system, which provides both the women & their digital village savings and loans groups (DVSLAs) with formal credit history and opportunities for those DVSLAs who are evolving into productive clusters. Further, these transactions are largely cashless and reach communities where there are often not physical banks. The �Tawisha� mobile phone application was developed in 2021, with testing done in 2022 and 2023, along-side a series of policy and protocol adaptations initiated by the Central Bank of Egypt to allow for digitised on-boarding (�banking�) of individuals, modified �know your client� banking procedures, collective bank accounts (the first of their kind in Egypt), and overall digital savings and lending through national banks. Hundreds of rural women who have been trained as formal banking agents under the Agricultural Bank of Egypt will support these digital savings groups. This work builds on a previous UN Women/NCW/CBE partnership, in which by the end of the project, rural women had increased their personal savings by no less than 3 - 4 times and reported use of such savings as a buffer against hardships, such as illness and family loss of income. In addition, some women also started their microbusiness with the accumulated savings. UN Women�s contributions to the GoE's national �Tawisha� programme will eventually reach 160,000 women across 10 governorates by 2025. The goal of the nationally-led programme is to enable rural women � through their participation in women-led digital savings groups - to open bank accounts, access personal savings and micro-loans, increase their financial and digital literacy, advance greater economic engagement, and be integrated into the formal economy. This result will drive the achievement of SDG 5 and SDG 1, and is overcoming the long-standing challenge of women being unbanked, without access to credit and with limited ownership over liquid assets � all of which directly impact women�s economic security and agency. The power of the Tawisha national programme and the digitsed tool is that the mobile banking application was developed with the most excluded in mind - women at risk of poverty in remote communities which have limited access to banks and which have low financial and IT literacy.