ShePowerChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Women’s Financial Inclusion and Empowerment

Abstract

Women still face persistent financial inclusion, employment verification, and wage transparency issues to their economic empowerment.Conventional hiring and financial systems impose disproportionate limitations on women to access credit and fair wages.ShePowerChain is a blockchain platform that aims to address these problems with decentralized finance, smart contracts, and verifiable credentials.ShePowerChain's secure, transparent, and automated transactions not only streamline processes but, depending on modeled scenarios, help reduce wage payment delays by 25% and increase women-led microloan access by 40%.By enabling secure, transparent, and automated transactions, ShePowerChain disintermediates, enhances job verification, and enforces wage fairness.The platform uses zero-knowledge proofs for privacy, multi-factor authentication for security, and Layer 2 scaling solutions for efficiency.While the results were from simulations and comparisons, they were not due to full real world usage.Comparative studies point to its potential to improve financial access, close wage gaps, and establish trust in hiring processes.The design also considers a serious ethical risk of excluding women who have low digital literacy, suggesting digital skills training, and adaptive strategies for community.Despite obstacles related to regulatory implications, and lack of digital literacy, blockchain provides an opportunity to facilitate and scale sustainable solutions to gender inclusive economic empowerment.