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> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly and Misha Dave, CFI
Dhanalakshmi (far right), client at Equitas
If there is one thing we have learned from working on disability and age inclusion in financial services, it is that including these populations in financial services is in some ways easier than practitioners expect it to be but, in other ways, harder than it looks.
In our research on aging and financial inclusion, one of the key insights was that financial service providers of all sizes often apply age caps on credit products. However, many institutions we talked with did not know exactly where these standards came from. Some attributed them to concerns about life expectancy of older clients, some to institutional history (“that’s just the way we do it”), some to the increase of credit portfolio insurance it would incur, and some to a perception of older people as economically dormant.
Many of these concerns can be mitigated by better research and dispelling myths about the creditworthiness of older people. Easy, right? In fact, there are some institutions that apply creative ideas to providing credit to older people. Group guarantees and automatic withdrawal payments on loans from publicly administered pensions through government partnerships are both examples of this.
However, such institutions providing credit to older people seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Worse, convincing institutions to care about this population is not easy. One institution we spoke with in India was baffled by the idea of providing credit to people over the age of 55. “But [the older people] could die and wouldn’t pay the loan,” the product developers insisted. Doing the research and articulating the issue was the easy part — now the hard work begins of advocating on behalf of older people.
Similar attitudinal barriers exist in financial institutions for serving persons with disabilities. Let’s take stock: over one billion people around the world — 1 in 7 of us — have a disability and four-fifths live in developing countries like India. Despite this and the fact that many microfinance institutions (MFIs) claim to be dedicated to “serving the world’s financially excluded people,” less than 1 percent of their clients are persons with disabilities.
> Posted by Abhishek Agrawal, India Country Director, Accion
#133417011 / gettyimages.com
Over the past two years, CFI’s three MFI partners in India have included over 13,000 persons with disabilities (PWD) as clients in mainstream financial services, helping them become economically active. Almost all of these clients were first-time borrowers.
CFI and Accion, with our knowledge partner v-shesh and MFI implementation partners – Annapurna based in Odisha, Equitas based in Tamil Nadu, and ESAF from Kerala – have been working on the financial inclusion of persons with disabilities over the past two years. This working group created tools and an operating model for MFIs to incorporate PWD as staff and clients. The recommendations, which include policy changes in non-discrimination and other areas, are being piloted at the MFIs. Disability awareness trainings have been conducted for over 100 MFI staff across the country. Over the next several months these staff will train another 6,000 frontline MFI staff.
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