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> Posted by Kimberly Mitchell, Business Analyst, Credit Suisse

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.”

This is the first in a series of several posts from this year’s Credit Suisse Virtual Volunteers, where research and insights across a variety of financial inclusion areas will be shared. The post begins:

Over the past few years, microfinance initiatives have empowered micro-entrepreneurs the world over to create and enhance their own businesses. However, not everyone has the ready-skills and resources to create their own successful business from scratch. For some entrepreneurs, it makes more sense to invest in a proven business model. In poor villages, this can take the form of a microfranchise.

In the developed world, everyone is familiar with franchises. The same goes for a big portion of developing regions. Businesses like McDonalds, Planet Fitness, and Pearl Vision provide a predictable and consistent-quality experience for consumers, a proven business model, marketing strategy, and often consistent source of supply for franchisees, and a scalable and profitable source of sales for the franchisor company. Microfranchise initiatives apply the principles of franchising on a smaller scale, with the aim of engaging a previously untapped market to provide a reliable source of income for the franchisees and more accessible products for consumers. The principle differences are that the amounts required for the business investment are smaller, and that the products are designed for the lower-income communities that the franchisees live in.

What potential does microfranchising hold to advance financial inclusion?

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