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> Posted by Hannah Sherman and Jeffrey Riecke, Project Associate and Communications Specialist, CFI
In terms of financial inclusion, Haiti has much to be excited about. That might come as a surprise as it is considered to have among the worst environments for financial inclusion efforts, at least according to the Global Microscope. In the 2015 Microscope rankings, Haiti was at the very bottom of the list. Though this 2015 score reflected great progress compared to 2014. In fact, Haiti’s score improved year-on-year more than nearly any other country. This was due in large part to the development of a national financial inclusion strategy. However, Haiti’s path forward, including the implementation of this national strategy, is less than straightforward.
Haiti is still very poor. More than three-quarters of the population lives on less than $2 a day, and about two-thirds are unemployed. According to the Global Findex, in 2014 only 19 percent of Haitians aged 15 or above had access to a bank account, compared with 51 percent across all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Nine percent of the adult population had formal savings in 2014 (compared with 14 percent regionally), and 5 percent were formal borrowers (compared with 11 percent in the region). Small and medium-sized businesses and microenterprises make up the majority of the country’s jobs, and their access to finance is extremely limited.
But in recent years, Haiti has achieved impressive advances in its policy, regulation, and enabling infrastructure. About a year ago the Banque de la République d’Haïti (BRH, the central bank) passed the national financial inclusion strategy, which was supported by the World Bank and other international organizations. Among the strategy’s priority areas are financial education and consumer protection. In July of last year, USAID and Haiti’s Office of Economic Growth and Agricultural Development announced plans to work towards expanding financial access in support of this strategy. Their effort focuses on harnessing partnerships across stakeholder types to pilot and develop interventions.
> Posted by Beth Porter, Financial Inclusion Policy Advisor for the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and the Better Than Cash Alliance
The following post was originally published on the Better Than Cash Alliance blog and has been re-published with permission.
Did you ever wonder why there is not International Men’s Day? There actually is such a day, by the way—it’s on November 19th, but there aren’t too many people marking it with a night off from cooking or cleaning or childcare for the guys!
The reason we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th each year is that the other 364 days look quite a bit like men’s days. In fact, globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men spend less than half that much time—and the unpaid labor gap is particularly large in developing countries. We are a long way from Planet 50:50 or gender parity. Indeed, the World Economic Forum predicts that the gender gap will not be closed until 2133.
This lack of parity manifests itself in many ways, including gaps in education, employment, and wages, and in the board room and public high office. And access to finance is no different.
While globally ownership of accounts is on the rise, the gender gap persists in developing countries, with the majority of the 2 billion globally without access to finance being women. We should not simply conclude that women do not want accounts—just as we cannot suppose that they do not want more education, the opportunity for gainful employment, or equal wages for equal work. We know that women living in a cash-only economy do not have adequate control over their finances, do not have the confidentiality they need to save and borrow and can only make or receive payments at others’ convenience, not their own. Wouldn’t a more plausible conclusion regarding the gender gap in financial inclusion be that women face barriers that men do not encounter in accessing financial services? Let’s explore this idea a bit further.
> Posted by Kim Wilson, Fellow, Center for Emerging Market Enterprises and the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University
“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” This aphorism credited to Albert Einstein inspires our call to Lean Research.
Two Fridays ago at MIT a group of 50 of us met to hash out some principles that, if followed, might generate better research in development and social science contexts. NGOs, universities, foundations, corporations, government, and multi-lateral agencies were represented in our group.
Our analogy of choice was Toyota. If “the Toyota way,” or lean manufacturing as it has come to be called, could cause profound and beneficial disruptions in production processes, might lean research cause equally profound and beneficial disruptions in research processes?
> Posted by Amanda Lotz, Financial Inclusion 2020 Consultant, CFI
Tomorrow, people around the world will celebrate International Women’s Day. In honor of the day, and the tremendous impact that financial services can have for women, we’d like to highlight some of the top resources from the past year that focus on financial inclusion of women. Though there are many great resources out there, below are a few that have caught our attention.
1. Findex Notes: Women and Financial Inclusion
Drawing from the Global Findex Database, the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created a briefing on the state of women’s access to and use of financial services globally. It’s a concise snapshot of financial inclusion data on women. It highlights gaps that persist for women, as compared to men, globally and across regions. It looks at variations in account ownership for savings and credit, as well as barriers to usage identified by women. And if you’re looking for more, I suggest exploring the Findex database or the CFI Data Explorer and conducting your own analyses!
2. Promoting Women’s Financial Inclusion: A Toolkit
DFID and GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development prepared a toolkit aimed at policymakers, donors, and NGOs who want to learn how to design and implement programs to enhance the financial inclusion of women. It provides insight into factors that contribute to financial exclusion of women and offers recommendations to address access barriers. In addition, the toolkit provides methods for client segmentation as well as several illustrative case studies. Rather than suggesting focusing on women exclusively, the toolkit also recommends understanding the distinct needs of men.
> Posted by Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative, the Council on Foreign Relations
The following post was originally published on Democracy in Development, Coleman’s CFR blog.
Imagine life without a bank account. Completing a simple financial transaction can require traveling a distance, incurring expenses, and losing precious income. Savings are more difficult to track and certainly don’t earn interest. Theft or loss of the proverbial “cookie jar” is a constant worry. Indeed, studies show that informal savers lose as much as 25 percent of their hard-earned cash each year due to theft and loss. Yet for over 2.5 billion people globally, this inconvenient, inefficient, and expensive reality is the case.
There are many reasons to believe that the number of unbanked people will shrink significantly in years to come, with important positive implications for economic growth and poverty reduction. First, grassroots and country-level efforts, both nonprofit and for-profit, are already showing how “unbanked” doesn’t have to be the status quo—and these efforts are greatly facilitated by mobile phones. Kenya is well-known for the widespread use of its mobile money system M-Pesa, which allows people to pay for goods and services through cell phones instead of with cash. Started in 2007, M-Pesa has already been used by the vast majority of Kenya’s adults.
Second, major financial institutions are supporting efforts to give more of the world’s population access to bank accounts and standard financial tools. Last summer, I wrote about Visa’s purchase of the mobile payments system Fundamo and the collaboration between USAID and Citi to expand financial inclusion, a promising instance of big financial institutions bringing their resources to bear on closing the financial inclusion gap.
> Posted by Ignacio Mas and Premasis Mukherjee, Independent Consultant and Senior Analyst, MicroSave
We recently completed extensive field work on people’s money management practices in India and Bangladesh, funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Our ostensible purpose was to develop simplified metaphors that express vividly how people think about money. You can judge for yourself how close we came to that by viewing (here) 10 different outputs. While our intent was to simplify, we ended up evolving a more nuanced view of how poor people think about money management (see here for a fuller treatment).
We echo Collins and Zollmann’s observation from their research in Kenya that poor people’s financial talk tends to relate much more to short term income security than to longer term goals or risks. Their main concern is that they want to have enough recurrent income to meet routine expenses. We unpack this into three interlinked concepts which, while by no means new, deserve more attention.
Shaping income to increase income security
Unlike organized sector employees, the mass market lives on a diet of irregular and often unpredictable income flows. From this, some larger routine expenses like school fees need to be met and emergencies need to be dealt with. Stuart Rutherford has placed lumping of money – the accumulation of balances into useful lump sums – as the key financial mechanism people use. What is interesting is that so often people use those lumps to buy a cow (or a rickshaw, or some merchandise for trading), whose main attribute is that it produces small daily income rather than being a good store of value. So they go from collecting a meager stream of small daily cash flows, to building a lump sum, and from there to creating more small daily cash flows. What pushes them on this cycle of sacrificing, lumping, and regenerating daily income – which we call income shaping – is the desire to change not only the size but also the timing and predictability of cash inflows. They see that as the key to providing for daily expenses, and building the routine of setting money aside regularly to build further useful lumps.
Income shaping is people’s preferred mechanism to achieve consumption smoothing: by building a regular income profile.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
Those of us living in higher-income countries rarely think about something that dominates our financial services: everything’s digital. From checking balances, to transferring money, to making payments, nearly everything’s digitized and accessible with an internet connection. However, for the 2.5 billion people who don’t have an account at a formal financial institution, making a payment or receiving money isn’t as simple as a few computer mouse clicks or a few seconds at an ATM machine. Managing finances the old fashioned way, with cash for transaction and jewelry, livestock, etc. for savings, creates numerous challenges and limitations. In A Digital Pathway to Financial Inclusion, a new report from Dan Radcliffe and Rodger Voorhies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the divide between cash and digital is examined, and a portrait of digital financial inclusion, and how we might reach it, is presented.
Compared to those using digital financial services, those using physical methods incur storage risks, transport costs, and psychological barriers to saving, Digital Pathway claims. On top of these, handling finances physically effectively drives a wedge between unbanked individuals and the formal economy as it’s more costly for the organizations and institutions of the formal economy to transact with people who are not “hooked in.”
> Posted by Dave Grace, Advisor, CFI
HOPE! Maybe it’s my punch drunk self toward the end of a way too long U.S. election cycle, but it’s the word that comes to mind following the meeting of 80 regulatory agencies in Cape Town. The Cape Town affair was the Alliance for Financial Inclusion’s (AFI) annual Global Policy Forum.
What was so hopeful? That 35 central banks from developing and emerging markets made or reported on past commitments to increase financial inclusion! In my two decades of work in development finance, this is the first time that policymakers, who have the power to change financial systems, are creating a global movement to help the poor in a material way. While some of the commitments from central banks are malleable, most are concrete. For example, Malaysia is seeking 95 percent access by 2012, Ghana is seeking 70 percent inclusion by 2017 and is changing its payments, financial literacy and mobile financial services framework to get there.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
The stage is set for large-scale financial inclusion expansion in Uganda, including amongst those at the base of the pyramid, according to a new report by InterMedia. Compiling the results of over 3,000 household surveys, Mobile Money in Uganda: Use, Barriers and Opportunities examines the uptake, use and market potential of mobile money services throughout the African country.
In order to participate in mobile money banking services, the only hardware an individual needs is an active SIM card – a data storage card used in mobile devices. They don’t even need their own phone, if they can use someone else’s phone when needed. The report finds that the accessibility of such hardware is widespread. Of the surveyed households, roughly two-thirds had at least one person who owned a mobile phone and an active SIM card. What’s more, over half of the country’s unbanked households and households living below the poverty line were deemed able to access a mobile phone and own a SIM card.
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