The Making Finance Work for Women Podcast

As global leaders debate the future of climate adaptation, an important question remains: what does resilience look like for the women experiencing climate shocks in their daily lives?   In this episode of Making Finance Work for Women, Dr. Sonja Kelly speakers with Roikhanatun Nafi'ah, founder and CEO of Crustea Indonesia, a climate start-up in Indonesia that uses solar-powered aeration and smart monitoring technology to help small-scale fish and shrimp farmers improve productivity, lower operating costs, and reduce climate emissions. Through her story, we examine how climate disruptions shape livelihoods of women entrepreneurs, influence financial decisions, and affect long-term security, while uncovering what her experience can teach us about the support and systems communities need most. To understand climate resilience, we must listen to the people living in it every day—not just the institutions shaping the conversation.   

Women entrepreneurs are not short on ambition, ingenuity, or discipline. What too many lack is access to the capital, networks, visibility, and trust needed to start, sustain, and scale businesses on their own terms. In this special crossover episode of Making Finance Work for Women and Radically Yours, Dr. Sonja Kelly and Radhika Bajoria explore the continuum of women’s entrepreneurship, from nano businesses and informal enterprises to venture-backed founders and companies with the potential to become unicorns.  The conversation examines what changes as women-owned businesses grow, and what stubbornly stays the same: underinvestment, biased assumptions about risk and leadership, inadequate networks, and financial systems that too often fail to see women-led businesses as growth businesses. Together, Sonja and Radhika look at the global $1.9 trillion finance gap facing women-owned SMEs, the persistent challenge of women founders raising capital, threat multipliers for women-led firms, and India’s fast-growing entrepreneurship ecosystem. The core message: the gap is not only talent. The gap is access to capital, networks, visibility, and trust. 

Women entrepreneurs are engines of economic growth, yet millions remain excluded from formal financial systems because their businesses operate informally, their financial histories are invisible, and traditional financial products fail to reflect how they earn, save, and manage risk. In this episode, Dr. Sonja Kelly sits down with Sarah Corley, CEO of the Alliance of Digital Finance and Fintech Associations, to explore how fintech innovations including alternative data, digital identities, embedded finance, and AI are helping women-led businesses move from invisible to investable. Drawing on insights from digital finance ecosystems across Africa and Asia, Sarah shares what it will take to redesign financial systems around the realities of women's lives and businesses, expanding their ability to earn more, influence financial decisions, and protect their livelihoods in the face of climate and health risks.

As insecurity and displacement continue to reshape northern Nigeria, how can financial systems adapt to serve those who need them most—especially women entrepreneurs and households navigating daily uncertainty? In this episode, our host Sonja Kelly has two conversations with a policymaker, Dr. Aisha A. Isa-Olatinwo, Director of the Consumer Protection and Financial Inclusion Department at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and a financial services provider, Ikemefula Nwachukwu, Head Financial Inclusion Services, FirstBank of Nigeria Limited, to explore what it takes to deliver meaningful financial support in fragile contexts. From rethinking risk and liquidity to deploying flexible credit, digital payments, and safety nets, the conversation examines how institutions can move beyond access to real resilience—ensuring women can sustain and grow their livelihoods even in crisis. 

In this episode, AI and Deepfake Cartographer Henry Ajder joins us to unpack what rapid advances in AI mean for trust, safety, and financial inclusion. As tools like deepfakes and voice cloning become more sophisticated, synthetic identity fraud and impersonation scams are becoming easier to scale and harder to detect. These risks are especially significant for people entering the financial system for the first time. When trust breaks early, adoption slows, and progress toward financial inclusion can reverse. We also explore how technology-enabled gender-based harm, including harassment and impersonation, is shaping how women participate online, and why the pace of innovation is outstripping the pace of consumer protection. At the same time, we discuss how AI presents real opportunity. Used responsibly, it can help financial institutions better understand customers and design services that reflect women’s financial lives. The question now is whether safeguards, accountability, and transparency will evolve quickly enough to ensure AI strengthens trust and helps finance work better for women.