Reporting snapshot · 4 November 2026 (Asia/Karachi). The 71 per cent and 27 per cent figures come from Governor Jameel Ahmad's remarks on 3 November. The published accounts of the speech do not give the survey year, the male and female rates, or the components behind the headline, so the number cannot be compared directly with household surveys of bank-account ownership. The four-day programme is a peer-learning exercise and does not by itself change policy.
What the State Bank announced
Pakistan’s financial inclusion rate has reached 71 per cent and the gender gap has narrowed to 27 per cent, State Bank of Pakistan Governor Jameel Ahmad said on 3 November, opening a four-day joint learning programme with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion in Islamabad, Geo News reported.
The programme brings 38 representatives of central banks and financial regulators from 24 countries to work on inclusive green finance, The Express Tribune reported, and is being held in Pakistan for the first time. Ahmad used the opening to argue that climate risk and financial exclusion reinforce each other: smallholder farmers, micro and small enterprises and low-income households are the most exposed to floods and heat, he said, and the least likely to hold insurance, savings or a formal account.
“Climate finance must do more than support green investments. It must also help communities anticipate risks, build resilience, and adapt to a changing climate,” the governor said, according to Geo News.
What the 71 per cent measures
The figure is a headline from a speech, not a published dataset. The State Bank describes its Pakistan Financial Inclusion Index as a tool that looks beyond account ownership, measuring access, usage and quality on indices that run from 0 to 100, according to the central bank. That design matters: a composite score can rise because more people can reach a service, because existing users transact more, or because the quality of what they use improves. The published accounts of Ahmad’s remarks do not say which of those the 71 per cent represents, or whether it is the composite index itself.
The distinction is not academic. Pakistan’s formal financial sector has expanded quickly through branchless banking and mobile wallets. The State Bank’s payment systems review for the year to June 2026 recorded 99.1 million branchless-banking app users and 30.4 million users of banks’ own apps, alongside 13.2 billion digital retail transactions, as KhabarWire reported. Those numbers describe activity through formal channels; they do not establish that every account holder uses the account regularly, or that the account comes with credit, insurance or savings products.
Financial inclusion is a statutory mandate for the State Bank under section 4(C) of the SBP Act 1956, and the central bank is implementing its current national strategy, NFIS 2024-28, which prioritises digital inclusion, women’s financial empowerment and responsible finance, the State Bank says. The strategy’s progress reports are where the underlying indicators are set out; the most recent report on the central bank’s website covers 2025.
The gap between women and men
The 27 per cent gender gap is the more consequential number in the governor’s remarks. It indicates that women remain substantially less included than men even as the overall rate rises. The published accounts do not give the male and female rates, so the gap cannot be converted into a precise count of excluded women from the speech alone.
The State Bank has built a set of programmes around that gap. Ahmad pointed to the Pakistan Women Inclusive Finance Programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank, and to Pakistan’s decision to join the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Code in 2025, with the State Bank as the anchor institution for the financial industry, Geo News reported. The central bank’s financial inclusion page also lists gender mainstreaming, the Asaan Mobile Account scheme for basic phones, and a national financial education roadmap among its instruments.
Why does the gap matter beyond the headline? Access to a savings account or insurance changes how a household absorbs a shock. A woman who can keep money in a formal account is less exposed to a crop failure, a hospital bill or a sudden loss of income, and a woman who can borrow can invest in a business. The State Bank’s own framing links those household outcomes to the climate agenda: the people least able to insure against floods are also the people least able to recover from them.
Why climate finance is in the same programme
The Islamabad programme is about “inclusive green finance”, a term that joins two policy agendas often run separately. Ahmad listed the State Bank’s green framework: the Green Banking Guidelines of 2017, the Environmental and Social Risk Management Framework of 2022, the Pakistan Green Taxonomy, regulations on climate-related financial risks, and climate stress-testing guidelines issued in December 2025, The Express Tribune reported. The taxonomy classifies which economic activities count as green; the stress tests ask financial institutions to model what climate shocks would do to their books.
The case for the work rests on the 2022 floods. Ahmad said the floods caused nearly $15 billion in physical damage and a further $15 billion in economic losses, affected more than 30 million people and damaged 2.2 million homes, Geo News reported. Those figures are the reason the State Bank argues that climate finance has to reach households and small firms, not only large green projects.
The participants are regulators from 24 countries, and the stated aim is to move from policy commitments to implementation. The Alliance for Financial Inclusion’s director of strategy, member engagement and evaluation, Aban Haq, and the World Bank’s operations manager, Lasse Melgaard, also addressed the opening session, Geo News reported. The World Bank’s presence is a reminder that much of the funding and technical support for these programmes comes from outside Pakistan.
What is still uncertain
The first uncertainty is definition. A 71 per cent inclusion rate is a strong claim, and the published accounts of the speech do not set out the survey or the component scores behind it. Until they are published, the figure should be read as the central bank’s own headline rather than an independently verified share of adults.
The second is the gender gap. A 27 per cent gap is consistent with a large difference in account ownership, but it could also reflect differences in usage or in the quality of services. The policy response differs depending on which: opening accounts requires different tools from making them useful.
The third is implementation. The four-day programme will produce no binding commitments, and the State Bank’s inclusion targets sit inside a strategy that runs to 2028. The test of the 71 per cent figure is not the number itself but whether the households outside the formal system, particularly women in rural districts, gain access to services they use and trust.
