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> Posted by Kadita “A.T.” Tshibaka, Board of Directors, Opportunity International
The World Bank and Gallup Poll’s “Global Findex” has only been out for a couple weeks now, and already I am seeing its use for my own work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the 1970s, I was privileged to be part of the team that launched Citibank in my country, the DRC, an experience that was to become useful for another start-up in the Cote d’Ivoire and later, decades later, in Eastern Europe. My career in banking started in operations where cash and tellers were part of my responsibilities. While I was formally exposed to cash first hand, Citibank was a corporate bank in the DRC, with very limited offerings of individual deposit accounts.
This experience with Citibank, while useful and educational, contrasted in many ways with my experience in cash management as I was growing up. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Michael Quesnell, Senior Manager, Sustainability, Nokia
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
It was just a year ago that I was sitting on the floor of a tiny local community building in a small village about 90 minutes outside of Ahmedabad, India listening to 30 women tell me what they wanted from mobile technology. These women, all leaders with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), were on their game despite the fact that my agenda was to get insights into a financial literacy application I was helping design. They were shrewd, insightful, and knew exactly what they wanted and needed to improve their important rural work in microfinance and membership services…I was about to get schooled. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Ida Rademacher, Chief Program Officer, CFED
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
A mentor of mine once told me, “If you want to sell a man lawn seed, talk about his lawn, not your seed.” It’s not hard to see how this applies to financial inclusion. To state the obvious, “If you want to sell a woman financial services, talk about her needs, not your products.” What are her risks? What products does she need at various points in her life? What does she need to know in order to be able to choose the options that best meet her needs? Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Lisa Kuhn Fraioli, Vice President, Latin America, Freedom from Hunger
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in Loja, Ecuador leading a delegation of board members, supporters, and their families in a visit to some of Freedom from Hunger’s newest partners. We were visiting a client who was part of a special credit program for families with disabled children.
The first woman that we visited lived in a semi-rural area. She had a tilapia farm, various fruit trees, herbs, and a whole variety of small-scale agricultural projects. Our delegation, which was very business-savvy, asked many insightful and detailed questions about her investments and returns on each of her activities. As is common, her answers were not very precise and somewhat contradictory. But, when they asked her for her vision for 5 years from now, her answer was clear—“I don’t want to have to worry as much.” While this might not have been much of a business plan, it was guiding her choices every day. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor for the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
Overheard at a party in Washington: “You should SOOO switch banks! Did you know that my bank offers reimbursement for ATM fees?”
Outside financial inclusion circles, it’s not often that a party conversation turns to a comparison of financial services. And even when it does, what seems like a high level of “financial capability” does not always translate into better use of financial services. If it did, the ease with which Americans talked about the great deal they got when they re-financed their homes would not have gone hand in hand with a financial crisis triggered by flaws in our mortgage banking system. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Susan Johnson, Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath, UK
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
On Tuesday, April 24, 2012, Susan Johnson will be discussing mobile banking and its implications in Kenya at the Center for Financial Inclusion. This event is open to the public and will be a brown bag luncheon discussion with Women Advancing Microfinance (WAM). For more information and to RSVP, please click here.
Savings have been seen as the “forgotten half” of microfinance for some time, and now the rapid growth of payment services over mobile phones suggests that these too have been a forgotten half! With some 15 million registered users of mobile money transfer services in Kenya, mobile payment services are meeting a vital need. But with access to a mobile money service often being treated as ‘financial inclusion’ in the policy discourse, it is also important to ask whether it really means the same for users as it does for policy makers. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Mildred Callear, Executive Vice President, SEAF
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
In the current political climate, and particularly at this time of year, it is rare that anyone speaks in favor of paying taxes! And when we think of financial inclusion, being included in the ranks of taxpayers is usually not the first item on the list.
But for those who operate primarily in the informal economy, NOT paying taxes can be the very thing that keeps them out of the formal sector and denies them a fair shot at real growth. Formal financial services are critical to breaking out of a subsistence level of business, yet even when informal firms have the choice to access such financial services, they may choose to stay out of the formal economy to avoid paying taxes and incurring other costs. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Tony Goland, McKinsey & Company
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
There are more than 2.5 billion people worldwide who live beyond the reach of formal financial services. Most of them come from lower-income households and/or run small and informal enterprises. For these households, credit is an important component of financial independence. Used responsibly, it enables investment in income-generating activities and enables better short-term liquidity management.
Lending to otherwise unserved households is challenging, not only because of their limited familiarity with formal financial services, but also because lenders often have little to none of the data they might traditionally use to assess the risk of lending to them. Conventionally you would look to a borrower’s banking and credit history. This tactic has proved less effective in emerging economies, especially among poorer customers who often have no record of past borrowing or earnings and lack formal savings or assets that could serve as collateral. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Marten Leijon, Chief Executive Officer, MIX
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
The idea of a world that is financially included is compelling. But it will be almost impossible to achieve without a groundswell of collaboration and creativity. A host of actors need to cooperate to bring transparency to financial services, to track progress over time and to help target outreach. And we may not know in advance who needs to participate for the effort to truly succeed.
Last fall, we at MIX set out to compile high-level data on financial inclusion in Nigeria. We were able to use data shared by the Central Bank of Nigeria to geo-tag the locations of 800+ microfinance banks in Nigeria. After publishing this mapping, we learned about the work of Dr. Adegbola Ojo who had compiled the NIGECS dataset with highly localized data on living conditions in Nigeria. Using the NIGECS data enabled a first-ever analysis of how the supply of microfinance in Nigeria matched against district-level demographics, such as poverty, household revenue sources (e.g., pensions, salaries) and other important factors.
In this case, data sharing by a regulator and a researcher led to knowledge exchange and a much closer look at how Nigeria is faring against its goals for financial inclusion—more than previously had been possible. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Shari Berenbach, Director, Office of Microenterprise Development at USAID
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
There is a wonderful Dr. Seuss book that I used to read to my daughter when she was little. I think the spirit of the book captures the critical place that microfinance finds itself in right now. It’s called Yertle the Turtle and other Stories.
When I was CEO of the Calvert Foundation, I began to read the book as a metaphor for my own work, and I see that even more strongly now from my vantage point as Director of the Office of Microenterprise Development at USAID.
In the book, Yertle plays an eponymous king whose kingdom is the size of a small pond. He convinces the turtles in his pond to stack themselves underneath him so that he can see further and expand his kingdom. At each height, Yertle looks around and declares, “I’m ruler of all that I see.” His world continues to expand, and his vision for his kingdom grows to fit that world. Read the rest of this entry »
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