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> Posted by Miranda Beshara, Arabic Microfinance Gateway
Alex Silva, Executive Director, Calmeadow
Governance is a business imperative, and investors are willing to pay a premium for effective corporate governance. This was one of the key takeaways from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Governance and Strategic Leadership Seminar, held recently in Amman, Jordan. We’ve seen this stated priority of governance in the MENA microfinance market exhibited elsewhere, too. A joint IFC-Sanabel report assessing the top perceived risks facing the microfinance industry in the Arab world uncovered that the market’s stakeholders viewed weak corporate governance structures as one of the more threatening risks out of roughly 30 risk categories. Financial service providers in particular perceive this risk to be rising.
> Posted by Allyse McGrath, Specialist, CFI
Join us in accelerating financial inclusion conversations globally!
We are excited to announce the third annual Financial Inclusion Week, an initiative to drive the global conversation around financial inclusion. In 2015 and 2016, over 70 partner organizations brought together thousands of people worldwide to discuss the most pressing actions needed to advance financial inclusion globally. In 2017, from October 30 to November 3, we will continue the conversations from last year and engage an even wider community of stakeholders to explore this year’s theme: New Products, New Partnerships, New Potential.
Around the world, digital channels are revolutionizing the way that customers access financial products and transforming the landscape of the financial inclusion industry. Financial service providers are harnessing an array of new technologies, data, and schools of thought to re-configure their products and how they offer them. New providers, including fintech startups, are entering the inclusive finance fold and legacy providers are increasingly partnering with them to expand service offerings and reach previously under-served customer segments. These new products and new partnerships bring great potential for creating a more inclusive global financial ecosystem. However, they may also bring new problems – such as issues surrounding data security, transparency on mobile platforms, and discrimination in alternative credit scoring. During Financial Inclusion Week 2017, partner organizations around the globe will hold conversations focused on how new products and partnerships are advancing financial inclusion.
> Posted by Bobbi Gray, Research Director, Grameen Foundation
We need to ensure products and services help family units, not just individuals, thrive.
Writing in 1982, about Fred Astaire, Robert Thaves wrote “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards…and in high heels.” Since then, this quote about two legendary dancers has been used to celebrate the skills and talents of women and to demonstrate their ability to juggle complexity and pull it off gracefully.
At Grameen Foundation, we celebrate women for the potential they carry for ending poverty and hunger. In fact, some statistics suggest that if women farmers had the same resources as their male counterparts, the number of hungry people in the world could be reduced by 150 million. Beyond access to quality farm inputs, credit, and land, we also know that when women have equal access to education, health services, and business services they can thrive economically. Helping mothers be healthy before and during pregnancy also results in healthier children and more productive societies. Women are a key driving force against poverty.
> Posted by Tanya Ladha, Senior Manager, Center for Financial Services Innovation, and Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on NextBillion.
Meet Shabana. She is a middle-aged woman, lives in a large metropolis and works at one of the city’s bustling train stations. One day, she suffered a severe workplace injury and wasn’t able to work for weeks. With no support from her employer, she realized how financially vulnerable she was, and decided at that moment to make a change. After recovering from her accident, she began saving almost 30 percent of her income, and after a year was shocked – and empowered – by the considerable financial cushion she had built herself.
Shabana’s story is one of resilience in the face of vulnerability, one of adapting daily habits, one of planning and achieving goals. It is a story of financial health, and it is universal. While Shabana lives in Mumbai, India, her story is relevant for millions of individuals around the world, both in developing and developed countries, including here in the U.S. It is this core concept that pushed the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), in partnership with the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to explore how a U.S.-oriented financial health framework could translate into a developing world context.
> Posted by Lara Storm and Nikhil Gehani, MIX
As financial services continue on the path to digitization, the amount of data available is expanding at a rapid pace. While gaps remain – most notably when it comes to quality and usage – the financial inclusion community has made significant progress in collecting timely, reliable and useful data. Yet no matter how much the flow of data improves, a key challenge persists: We are data rich and information poor. The late Hans Rosling left us with the simple truth that, “Having the data is not enough.”
The growing libraries of data make it difficult to separate the signal from the noise; actionable intelligence is sometimes obscured by the volume of available data points. The rapid uptake of digital financial services in low- and middle-income countries has contributed to the expansion of available data and shows no signs of slowing. The challenge presented to policy makers, financial service providers (FSPs) and funders is to derive insights that can inform decisions related to financial inclusion – without being buried in the avalanche of data.
> Posted by Center Staff
What’s better than blog posts? As a blogger, I’m inclined to assert that nothing is in fact better than blog posts. Alas, with self-awareness, I think we can all agree that interactive websites are cool. And that interactive websites about client protection in microfinance are especially cool!
Created by Nathalie Assouline of Alia Développement, a new interactive website offers users a media-rich experience for learning about the development of the microfinance industries in Cambodia and Morocco, with a special focus on client protection.
> Posted by James Militzer, Editor, NextBillion Financial Innovation
The following post, which was originally published on NextBillion, shares a conversation between Anna Kanze, COO of Grassroots Capital Management, and Daniel Rozas, Independent Consultant, on initial public offerings (IPOs) in microfinance. Both Anna and Daniel have contributed to a number of Financial Inclusion Equity Council (FIEC) publications. Anna was the principal author of the recent FIEC report, “How to IPO Successfully and Responsibly: Lessons From Indian Financial Inclusion Institutions”. The podcast draws from the report’s findings and focuses on the effects of IPOs on Equitas Holdings, Ujjivan Financial Services, SKS Microfinance, and Compartamos.
Initial public offerings have long been a controversial topic in microfinance, and rightly so. The IPOs of Compartamos in Mexico and SKS Microfinance in India, in 2007 and 2010 respectively, made a lot of money for investors and turbocharged the sector’s growth. But they also sparked hyper commercialization and debt crises that rocked the industry, gravely harming its clients and tarnishing its public image.
> Posted by Vinita Godinho, General Manager – Advisory, Good Shepherd Microfinance
You might not know it, but one in every five Australian adults (3.3 million people) is financially excluded, unable to access safe, affordable, and appropriate financial products and services when they need them. This increases their likelihood of experiencing financial hardship and poverty. Two million people in the country also experience high to severe financial stress, reducing their resilience or ability to recover from financial shocks. Those impacted, particularly women, also experience poorer socioeconomic and health outcomes, especially lower education, employment, and income status. Whose problem is this to solve?
Against the backdrop of ongoing global financial and political uncertainty, financial inclusion challenges exacerbate the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. In Australia for example, those holding the top 20 percent of wealth have around 70 times more than those in the bottom 20 percent. The country’s growing income inequality does not reflect changes in household characteristics, rather changes in the size of persistent and transitory income shocks. Lack of inclusion and resilience via insurance, savings, credit, and payments therefore compound the impacts of growing inequalities of opportunity, stifling upward mobility between generations, increasing social tensions, and reducing economic growth.
So who’s best placed to respond to this growing problem – the government with its policy vision for financial well-being and capability; business which designs product offerings and offers employment; researchers who study inequality, gather evidence and create theories; or the community sector, which is usually the first line of defense for excluded and vulnerable Australians?
> Posted by Ros Grady
The following post was originally published on Ros’ website.
2016 has seen a sharp-eyed global focus on clarifying what responsible digital financial inclusion means in practice. This is connected to the increasing recognition that digital financial inclusion brings new and significant risks for consumers, as well as considerable benefits.
The September 2016 McKinsey Global Institute Report – How Digital Finance Could Boost Growth in Emerging Economies – suggests that widespread use of digital finance (payments and digital services delivered via mobile phones and the Internet) could add $3.7 trillion to the GDP of emerging economies – or six percent – by 2025. Which in turn could create around 95 million jobs.
So responsible digital financial inclusion is important.
But what was new in 2016? Consider these important developments:
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