For decades, a single, misguided question has quietly strangled the growth of Pakistan’s rural economy: are women farmers bankable?
Year after year, traditional financial institutions cite a lack of land ownership titles, informal working structures, and perceived credit risks as their justification for bypassing millions of female cultivators. But as climate shocks compound across our agricultural heartlands, it is time to flip the script and ask the honest, uncomfortable question: Is our financial system actually designed to bank them?
The perennial challenge in Pakistan’s financial inclusion landscape is not a lack of economic vitality or capability among rural women. It is our stubborn refusal to redesign financial systems around economic reality rather than administrative convenience.
Pakistan stands today among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. Agriculture forms the backbone of our economy, contributing roughly 23 per cent to our GDP and employing 37 per cent of our national workforce. Within this massive engine, women represent 67 per cent of the total female agricultural labour force. They sow seeds, tend livestock, harvest crops, manage post-harvest activities and safeguard household food security. Yet, barely 2.0 per cent of these women own the land they cultivate.
When climate disasters strike – as over 90 per cent of surveyed women across Punjab and Sindh have experienced in the past five years – household incomes plummet by as much as 80 per cent. As the current El Nino phenomenon threatens ongoing crop yields, women bear the brunt without formal safety nets. When crisis hits, the formal financial door remains firmly shut simply because they lack a piece of paper proving land ownership.
To break this bottleneck, we must look at hard evidence rather than entrenched cultural assumptions. Consider the data from Zarkhez-e – an initiative explicitly designed to challenge the idea that land title must be the sole gateway to credit by providing uncollateralised, end-to-end digital financing directly to smallholder landholding farmers as well as tenant farmers for the first time.
The operational data reveals a transformative reality: although women represented only 6.2 per cent of applicants through the digital app and portal, their loan approval rate stood at an astonishing 64.2 per cent – compared to 54.6 per cent for men. Crucially, half of these successful female applicants were tenant farmers with zero land titles, and 63 per cent belonged to marginalised districts in southern Punjab. This is not a marginal discrepancy; it is a powerful empirical signal that when women reach the formal credit system, they do not default; they perform, deliver and honour the system’s trust at a higher rate than men.
Perhaps the biggest gender problem in finance is not credit risk at all; it is access to the front door in a systematic, dignified, and sustainable manner. Why, then, does the credit gap persist despite such performance? The discomforting answer lies in our historical land administration legacy.
Decades ago, Pakistan undertook land reforms with important social and economic goals. However, when traditional reforms collided with patriarchal inheritance norms and cultural biases, women were effectively excluded from formal economic gains. Women may work the soil from dawn to dusk, make critical farm management choices, and generate daily cash flows, but if formal banking regulations recognise only the registered landowner as an ‘economic actor’, we render women invisible and directly sabotage Pakistan’s overall economic growth.
We urgently need a census-based land and agricultural reform framework. We must move beyond asking exclusively, ‘Who owns the land title?’ to capturing, ‘Who drives household cash flows? Who contributes directly to farm productivity? Who manages livestock and production decisions?’ By linking gender-disaggregated agricultural activity data directly with financial products, credit can finally be structured around actual operational cash flows rather than static land deeds.
Transforming this ecosystem requires a pragmatic, cohesive architecture where public policy actively catalyses private commercial capital. We no longer need to wait for traditional, male-dominated extension services to reach rural women; climate alerts, crop advisories, market price discovery, index insurance details and financial literacy content can now be pushed directly to women’s mobile devices in local languages via channels they already utilise daily.
Building on this digital foundation, we must explore leveraging the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) as a direct agricultural-finance gateway. Imagine an eligible farming woman, already verified in the social safety network, applying digitally for cash-flow-based farm credit. When a climate disaster strikes, an automated contingent risk transfer or conditional transfer kicks in instantly. This transforms vulnerability into resilience, stopping women from being pushed into the predatory hands of informal moneylenders (arthis) post-flood just to keep their families alive.
At the same time, because traditional field-data crop insurance takes months to process claims while livelihoods collapse, we must rapidly shift towards remote sensing, satellite-based agronomy intelligence, and parametric insurance. When satellite imagery confirms a drought or flood threshold, area-yield payouts should trigger automatically within two to three weeks, allowing farmers to rehabilitate immediately.
This ethos is built into Zarkhez-e, where national space agencies and data systems provide sophisticated agronomy data analytics to banks’ credit-scoring models, which drive decision-making. In this entire architecture, the government does not need to act as a direct lender; instead, it must continue to build catalytic risk-sharing mechanisms, blended finance structures and supportive financial data infrastructure. Banks must expand on models like Zarkhez-e to lend based on cash flow and repayment capacity, while concessional capital from international development partners can be deployed to de-risk commercial portfolios and crowd in mainstream banking capital.
A loan in isolation, however, is not resilience. A woman farmer requires a complete, holistic bundle: access to capital, parametric insurance, climate alerts, resilient seeds, tech tools, extension agronomy advice virtually from agri-tech-based agronomists and direct market access. This is how we move from financing post-disaster recovery to financing pre-disaster resilience.
Under the Prime Minister’s Access to Finance Plan – specifically its dedicated agri finance vertical – Pakistan has committed to expanding formal credit outstanding to unbanked farmers through innovative financing solutions. The proof of concept is already here; Zarkhez-e has shown that the women are present, capable and ready.
Let us move decisively from diagnosis to mainstreaming to national scale. Gender-responsive climate finance is not a moral concession; it is the fundamental key to financing Pakistan’s economic resilience, enhanced agricultural productivity and national food security.
The writer is an adviser to the federal minister for finance and revenue. He is a seasoned banker with over 30 years ofexpertise. He can be reached at: [email protected] The views expressed are the writer’s own.
