> Posted by Josh Goldstein aka Mr. Provocative
The painful crawl toward full inclusion of all citizens in all realms of activity is one of the major storylines in American history. It is a key measure of the success of our democratic experiment that we, the people of the 21st century, continue to work with uneven success to perfect our society. How far we have come from the republic of our 18th century founders when only white male property owners enjoyed the privileges of full citizenship! But the advances toward equal rights and opportunities for women, African Americans, gays, persons with disabilities, and other minorities have come through the hard work over many generations of devoted citizen activists fighting for their causes and constituencies.
The point is that rights are not obtained by one Presidential decree, like the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in Confederate territory, or one legal remedy, like the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution that enshrined women’s right to vote. These were essential milestones that secured progress, but they were preceded by decades of struggle and would have proven ephemeral if the generations that followed had not persisted in that struggle. There were many setbacks and detours along the way. Nothing was automatic or achieved without extraordinary persistence and sacrifice.
In pursuing financial inclusion, the Center for Financial Inclusion works toward this ideal of non-discrimination, with a special emphasis on economic equality and opportunity for poor people around the world. Nowhere is this more pointed than in the “Responsible Treatment of Clients” principle, one of the Smart Campaign’s Client Protection Principles for customers of financial institutions.
The Responsible Treatment of Clients principle declares that financial institutions will not “discriminate.” And in the accompanying guidance document it elaborates as follows: “Client selection and treatment should not involve discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, disability, religion or orientation. Non-discriminatory treatment is important for providing access to financial services to all clients who can use them and builds their confidence in the fairness of the provider.” And the newly promulgated certification standards will require compliance to this core principle if certification is to be granted.
Here is what worries me: Requiring immediate compliance with this noble non-discrimination principle may be unrealistic. The principle is ahistorical and non-contextual. It implies a global consensus on rights and assumes a universality that does not exist. Tolerance, let alone acceptance of homosexuality, just to name one example, is not a given in most countries. Far from it – as we know perfectly well to this day in the United States.
The principle may be at odds with a particular country’s local history, time-honored mores and folkways. When I look at how long it has taken, and continues to take the United States (more than 200 years) to come into imperfect compliance with the very principles upon which it was founded, I believe we need to be patient and tactful in asking for immediate compliance from financial institutions in other nations that have different founding premises. This is both unrealistic and unfair and could have the unintended consequence of provoking a fierce reaction and setting back the cause of equality.
At the same time, gently pushing institutions towards non-discrimination and equal opportunity should continue. The ideals enshrined in the Client Protection Principles are worth fighting for. But the principles must have enough built-in flexibility to take account of local realities. The certification teams will have to find ways to strike the right balance and should be prepared for the complexity of the task. The crawl towards inclusion is not a straight line.
Great change does not happen overnight.
Image credit: Victoria Labalme / Property Manager
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February 13, 2013 at 5:35 am
John Gitau
Josh,
This can’t be said better. You are right. Expecting certification to be preceded by the jettisoning of the stated discriminatory practices is expecting too much too soon. My take is, a performance bar set too high may encourage shortcuts, drop out or apathy. Deeply entrenched human predispositions require time to temper.
Let us hope that all that time and resources input into Certification is not repaid through cosmetic behind the scene maneuvers to comply.
But, all is not lost. We human beings have the good and the ugly sides of us. The good side is represented by good intentions. The bad in most cases is like grindstones on our necks or bloody war trophies we don’t want out of sight. All manners of discrimination are absurd.
However, people of good intentions have technology hats to cover the humanity’s bald and ugly scarred heads. An ATM, if it has any discriminative features, is perhaps an oversight rather than a deliberate bias in money dispensing.
In Kenya, we have M-Swari, a technology based saving and lending mechanism serving anybody who has a phone and Safaricom’s Mpesa. Within just two months 1.6 million people, most at the BOP(going by the average savings and loans of $10 and $13 respectively) are being served. $33 million has been saved in M-swari over this period. Ordinarily, it would take a bank or an MFI years to mobilize such savings. Safaricom, the innovator is not even a financial institution but it has created an infrastructure that can help banks improve on financial inclusion.
If in modern warfare, people of good intentions have devised unmanned war planes with smart bombs and drones to reduce human casualties, then, in financial inclusion, we can devise hands off mechanisms that “kill discrimination dead”
Josh, I am commenting on what you have written and through your ideas, I am getting knowledge inclusion through this Forum. I doubt you bother who I am, where from or my physical features. You are just happy that we are communicating and that is what matters. And our agenda is thinking together how as many people as possible can be financially included irrespective of their characteristics.
In Thomas Friendman’s book “The World is Flat” it is amazing that a house wife in India is engaged to book customers into planes in America. To the customer, it doesn’t matter where the call-centre is located or the characteristics of those manning the centres. We all know that physical contacts at times bring out the worst in human beings. With globalization, some biases will meet their death. We in financial inclusion need to look for ways that would replace our weaknesses in facilitating unbiased inclusion.
Sometimes, guidelines and restrictions work in reminding us of what we are fighting and we end up having more of it. I read Wallace D Wattles piece that said ” poverty will not be reduced by having more rich people involved in poverty eradication; but rather by getting more poor people to think about wealth”. Likewise, it is not the number of restrictions or rules we put in place that will reduce biases but the coming up with innovative interventions that don’t have default discriminative features in their makeups. That doesn’t mean rules are unnecessary. They sure are. But 2 years for over 30 experts was sufficient to come up with revolutionary and paradigmic ways of fast tracking financial inclusion instead of just rules, guidelines and certification. The world is moving very fast and with the technological trends, we may create setups that become moribund by the time recommendations are filed for public consumption. If we are serious, let us innovate rather than renovate.
In conclusion, the era of mutual consensus to start doing one thing or stop doing another will come to pass by de-humanizing the areas that we feel will take time to change the underlying.. This is the obligation of people of good intentions( Thank you Dean Karlan for popularizing the phrase good intentions).