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> Posted by Lisa Kienzle, Director, Mobile Financial Services, Grameen Foundation
The following post was originally published on the ImpactX blog of the Huffington Post.
Women participating in paper prototyping for new mobile app in Uganda
Women are the backbone of the household in Africa — they manage the home, care for the children, are responsible for education and healthcare, and contribute to the household’s livelihood. Helping women helps the entire family. However, women continue to lag men in participating in the formal economy, including accessing financial services.
The Problem: The Poor — Especially Women — Are Excluded From Financial Services.
For the rural poor — especially women — accessing formal financial services is nearly impossible. Few have formal identification needed to open an account; others lack a stable job or collateral needed for a loan. Often bank branches are far from a rural village, making the trip to deposit or borrow funds too expensive and time-consuming.
Many of the rural poor have taken up an approach to support saving and borrowing by forming Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs). Under this approach, 25-30 members of a community form a group. This group meets weekly and saves a fixed amount — at times, as little as 20 cents a week. The savings are lent out to members as loans. All money not lent out is stored by the group treasurer in a metal box secured with three locks and three keys, which are held by three separate key holders. It is, as some group members call it, the “Village Bank.”
> Posted by Alexa Roscoe, Private Sector Advisor, CARE International UK
The Financial Inclusion 2020 project at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
CARE International promotes microinsurance as part of the range of services and products that the poor need to help overcome poverty and reduce their vulnerability to shocks. However, we also know that as with all products, to be sustainable, any microinsurance model also needs to be profitable. Fortunately for the insurance industry and its clients, it’s being demonstrated that increasing profit and promoting financial inclusion do not have to be mutually exclusive. New research from our work in India shows that microinsurance distribution strategies that prioritize building clients’ financial literacy lead to almost three times as many new enrollments as those that do not.
There are a number of substantial challenges in marketing and distributing microinsurance products. Frequently, it is less a matter of marketing a product than building a new market from scratch, often in remote, hard-to-reach areas, with a client group without access to formal financial services. These factors make the costs of marketing to, distributing to and servicing clients disproportionate to the resulting margins. A number of strategies are being piloted globally to circumvent these challenges. For example, building off of growing mobile penetration rates among developing country populations, one initiative bundles an insurance product with the purchase of a SIM card. While this requires a lower initial investment, the jury is still out on the long-term value of such products. Unless clients receive thorough product education, such “blended approaches” might hinder awareness of the insurance product, as well as re-enrollment and the building of any brand loyalty.
> Posted by Alice Allan, Head of Advocacy, CARE International UK
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
CFI has rightly identified that having a range of financial products informed by client needs is a key priority area for achieving full financial inclusion. Through the Banking on Change Partnership, CARE, Plan, and Barclays have developed new savings-led products based on a link between informal savings groups and Barclays bank branches that have proven to be a good fit for low-income clients in the current financial services landscape.
To date, Banking on Change has developed three different types of savings accounts and an overdraft facility, connecting a total of 500 groups (that’s around 25,000 individuals) to Barclays branches. Together these groups have deposited $103,694 into accounts, showing that linkage with a global bank is possible when done in a controlled and responsible way.
Now, for the details…
The Uwezo savings product in Kenya is a good example of a Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) product designed with client needs in mind. The design process started with an assessment of the group’s needs, which clearly brought out the fact that members had greater financial services needs than the VSLAs could provide. We learnt that members could meet the obligations of these more formal financial services, provided they were packaged appropriately and delivered through the right kind of channels.
With this in mind, Barclays adapted its procedures to allow savings groups to open accounts easily. Before this initiative, formal registration with the Chamber of Commerce was required to open a group account. To simplify the process, Barclays agreed to accept a photocopy of the savings group’s constitution, signed by all members, as the necessary identification. By allowing group accounts, Barclays has lowered its transaction costs, as one group account is far more economical to administer than 25-30 individual accounts.
> Posted by Alice Allan, Head of Advocacy, CARE International UK
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
Today marks the start of an important meeting in Monrovia, Liberia, where the UN High Level Panel will look at what might replace the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015. With a focus on economic transformation, the panel hopes that any future framework to reduce poverty includes increasing “jobs and growth,” and “tackling inequality.”
Those of us focused on financial inclusion believe increased access to finance can help achieve these admirable aims. But would the UN High Level Panel agree?
Last week the Banking on Change partnership between Barclays, CARE International, and Plan UK produced Banking on Change: Breaking the Barriers to Financial Inclusion, a report which, amongst other things, makes the case compellingly enough that we believe the UN High Level Panel should take note.
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