DCED-BEAM Online Workshop: Designing interventions to address gender norms

This workshop happened on 3 March 2026

Gender norms shape the behaviour of market system actors; they determine how different genders are perceived and treated, influencing everything from policies to business practices. These collectively held expectations and perceived rules for behaviour based on gender identity are often the root cause of women’s financial and market exclusion. In practice, these norms can restrict women's mobility, financial decision-making, ownership of assets, and access to mobile phones, creating obstacles for consumers and causing biases and unsuitable products from financial and market service providers.

CGAP’s new technical guides focused on gender norms help development actors move beyond symptoms to address the root causes of women’s financial exclusion. The Diagnostic Guide introduces a structured, field-tested approach to uncover how gender norms shape market actor behavior, while the Design Guide, developed with the FSD Network, provides step‑by‑step tools to turn these insights into targeted interventions. Together, they offer a roadmap for building more inclusive and equitable systems for women’s financial and market inclusion.

This workshop is part 2 of a 2-part online series and offers development practitioners a powerful set of field-tested instruments for examining norms-driven constraints and identifying high impact intervention points, based on CGAP’s practical technical guides.

This workshop is tailored specifically for intervention designers in implementing agencies or funding organisations, and it is recommended that participants have attended or watched the recording of webinar 1. Participants will be expected to be fully engaged for 90 minutes to take part in the exercises.

The workshop will build on the foundational knowledge shared in webinar 1 and provides guidance and context through a highly practical and interactive exercise led by CGAP on how development actors can identify:

• why women cannot access services even when they are physically available;
• why financial institutions maintain practices that exclude women, despite stated inclusion goals;
• how regulatory frameworks can unintentionally reinforce gender disparities;
• how development actors can prioritize constraints and design interventions that reduce information asymmetry, build institutional capacity, and align incentives to influence behaviour change