Key Evidence

Rigid repayment terms misalign with women’s income patterns and create unnecessary default risk. Evidence across multiple markets shows that introducing adaptable repayment structures—including bi-weekly  or seasonal schedules, grace periods, and parietal payment options—improves outcomes for both borrowers and lenders without sacrificing repayment performance. 

• A randomized study in Bangladesh found that offering flexible credit terms (two monthly repayments at any point during a 12-month loan cycle) improved borrowers’ economic outcomes and socioeconomic status while reducing default probability. (Battaglia, Gulesci, & Madestam, 2021)
• In India, a randomized study of 799 microenterprises found that when borrowers could choose a flexible repayment contract designed to accommodate irregular cash flows, enterprise profitability increased without any decrease in repayment rates. (Barboni & Agarwal, 2023)
• Annapurna Finance in India applies a hazard mapping approach to proactively identify customers likely to be affected by cyclones and severe weather, offering flexible loan terms and early support before shocks occur. The approach strengthens both portfolio stability and client climate resilience, demonstrating that flexibility can be institutionalized as a risk management strategy. (Women’s World Banking, 2024).

Age-based restrictions exclude women at both ends of their financial lives, encoding assumptions about productivity and risk that do not reflect women’s actual economic behavior. Replacing blanket age caps with risk-based eligibility assessment, such as evaluating applicants on repayment history, income stability, and financial behavior rather than age alone, would better reflect actual creditworthiness and expand access without increasing portfolio risk. 

• Upper-age credit caps disproportionately affect women, who live longer together than men on average and are more likely to remain economically active as caregivers, small business operators, or household managers in later life. Banket caps have been characterized as a form of discrimination and a missed market opportunity: pose-retirement populations show continued economic activity, yet many lenders disqualify them automatically. In India, lenders commonly cap credit eligibility at age 55 despite a significantly higher life expectancy. (Kelly et al., 2015; Malik et al., 2024)

Standard collateral and insurance requirements embed assumptions about asset ownership and risk that systematically disadvantage women. Addressing these constraints requires both product-level redesign and collaboration with insurance providers to develop more flexible underwriting criteria–including risk-pooling across customer segments and government-backed guarantee schemes—so that the cost of extending coverage to older or asset-poor borrowers does not fall disproportionately on women who need it most. 

• Banks in West African countries frequently require significant collateral for SME loans — a practice that disproportionately excludes women, who are less likely to hold assets in their own names. (European Investment Bank, 2020)