By Rachael Murage, Head of Women Banking, Co-op Bank

Walk into any market in Nairobi, any trading centre in Eldoret, or any agrovet in Homa Bay, and you will find women running the show. They are stocking shelves, negotiating with suppliers, managing staff and reinvesting whatever profit is left at the end of the month back into the business. By sheer number of hands on deck, Kenya’s small business economy runs on women. Yet when it comes to who the banking sector actually lends to, the picture tells a different story.

According to the Kenya Bankers Association, women account for 48 per cent of Kenya’s MSME borrowers, nearly matching men. But that participation does not translate into capital. Of the roughly KES 613 billion in outstanding MSME credit in the country, women hold just 26 per cent. For every KES 1,000 extended to a male-owned enterprise, a woman-owned business receives only KES 354. At a national level, the International Finance Corporation puts Kenya’s credit gap for women at USD 1.3 billion. These are not small discrepancies that will close themselves with time. They are structural, and they show up in who gets to expand a business, who gets to hire, and who gets left running the same stall at the same size for a decade.

What makes this gap particularly stubborn is that it persists even as Kenya has made genuine progress elsewhere. Mobile money and digital finance have narrowed the country’s overall gender gap in formal financial inclusion to just 1.6 per cent, among the smallest in Africa. Women are no longer locked out of the financial system in the way they once were. But inclusion and capital are not the same thing. Only 46.5 per cent of women hold formal banking products such as loans and accounts, compared with 58.9 per cent of men. Women have phones, wallets and access. What they still do not reliably have is a bank willing to lend against the business they are actually running.

I have sat across the table from enough women entrepreneurs to know why this happens, even when no one intends it to. Lending models built around traditional collateral, formal payslips and long credit histories were not designed with a woman running a small market stall, a home-based caterer, or a small trader who reinvests her earnings faster than she can build a paper trail in mind. None of that reflects a lack of discipline or ambition. It reflects a mismatch between how women actually build businesses and what a conventional loan application assumes about them.

This is why, at Co-operative Bank of Kenya, we built ELA, short for Everyday Life Amplified, specifically around that mismatch rather than around a generic idea of who a “woman customer” is. Women running or owning a business can access unsecured working capital of up to KES 10 million, or up to KES 20 million on a secured basis, with a 0.5 per cent interest discount for businesses that are wholly owned or majority-led by women. Women in formal employment can apply for personal loans against their KYC documentation and payslips. Because we know a woman’s financial life does not pause for family responsibilities, we have built in a three-month repayment moratorium for customers on maternity leave, alongside training and networking support delivered through our women banking network.

None of this closes a USD 1.3 billion national gap on its own, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But every institution that decides to price risk differently, to look at a woman’s cash flow instead of only her collateral, and to build products around how she actually works rather than how a manual assumes she should, moves that number. Credit gaps close one underwritten loan at a time, not through goodwill statements.

Kenya has already shown what is possible when the financial sector takes a barrier seriously. The near closure of the mobile money gender gap did not happen by accident; it happened because banks, regulators and mobile network operators treated women’s financial access as a problem worth solving with real products, not just messaging. The credit gap deserves the same seriousness. Women are not asking the banking sector for a favour. They are asking it to lend against the businesses they have already proven they can run.

The author is Head of Women Banking, Co-op Bank.