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> Posted by Lisa Kuhn Fraioli, Independent Consultant
When Meri was first interviewed by Freedom from Hunger for its impact stories research in 2008, she was a classic microfinance success story. This hard-working mother of five from Huancayo, Peru had a successful business buying grains in the local market, milling them, and processing them into a type of custard that she then sold in Lima at a good price. The loans that Meri received from her local microfinance organization allowed her to buy more grain, invest in new products, and transport them for sale in Lima. The loans had helped Meri grow her business beyond the subsistence level for the first time. She now had a profit that she invested in food, healthcare, and education for her children.
When interviewers returned to Meri in 2011, the story had turned into a tale of desperation and distress. Now, Meri says, “I try to sell underwear and socks, but it almost never goes well. We are hungry. Sometimes there isn’t enough food. It’s very rare that we buy meat, and what I prepare, I give to my daughters and hope that my husband brings something to eat.” She is no longer able to send all her children to school. What happened to Meri?
After the birth of her fifth child, Meri suffered an internal hemorrhage and was hospitalized. The doctor warned her that her condition was very delicate and that she could no longer make the eight-hour trip to Lima to sell her products. Unable to travel, she reluctantly shut her business down. Meri’s family’s sole source of income was now the few soles that her husband brought in as a shoeshine. Meri owes the hospital for her emergency treatment and used money from her business loan to help pay for it. Then she borrowed from a bank, the municipality, and two more microfinance organizations. Meri can’t find any new business that gives her stable income. Meanwhile, her debts weigh upon her heavily. She is still in pain, but she can’t afford the 15 dollars it would cost for an ultrasound. She says, “It seems that the stress is accumulating in my stomach. Every day it hurts me as if the anxiety were taking away my potential.” Meri, overdebted with no means to repay her loans, is now effectively excluded from the financial system as a poor credit risk. She is still struggling to get back to the economic position she was in 10 years ago. She needs to develop a new business, one less dependent on traveling, but she will have to do so without any help from microfinance.
> Posted by Arielle Salomon, Account Manager, Entrepreneurial Finance Lab
Providing financial services to entrepreneurs is a challenging operation in developing countries where small businesses may be isolated in a rural village without reliable roads or internet coverage. Service providers must pay the high costs of employing staff to reach out to remote villages while capturing limited revenue from small-scale products. Yet entrepreneurs in these regions need tools like credit and insurance to make investments and grow their businesses as just as do their counterparts in more developed regions.
Mobile phones are changing the financial landscape helping to expand the possibilities of service models. With novel mobile solutions to bridge the financial access gap, innovators can provide entrepreneurs with new tools and opportunities to support their businesses.
Here are a few cutting-edge models rendering financial services more portable:
Portable Bank. Opportunity International (OI) is putting its bank on wheels. With a portable bank that offers savings, loans, and other such financial services regularly circulating within walking distance of clients’ farms or small businesses, entrepreneurs do not have to miss out on business to trek to the bank. OI is developing these portable bank branches in locations around the world. OI also offers electronic wallets that allow customers to make deposits on mobile phones. With this cashless solution, the bank reduces both the risk of client theft/robbery and also the likelihood of staff fraud. OI’s electric wallets are currently in use in Malawi and seven other African countries.
Portable Credit. The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) is helping banks, MFIs, and other partners improve operations with portable technology. Not only can loan officers complete credit applications electronically on a mobile phone or tablet, but they can also collect photos and the precise location of their clients with the use of mobile GPS. With near-real-time scoring of the EFL Tool, an application that captures the ability and willingness of customers to repay a loan, banks have the opportunity to pre-approve clients on the spot. The improved efficiency of automated data collection and credit assessment decreases service turnaround time and increases credit access. The EFL Tool has been used in over 20 countries to date and has processed over 50,000 credit applications. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Barbara Magnoni, President, EA Consultants and Client Value Project Manager, MicroInsurance Centre MicroInsurance Learning and Knowledge (MILK) Project
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process, and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
Is there a business case for microinsurance? Does it provide value for clients?
We began the MILK Project by mapping existing research on these two questions. We were surprised to see that very few studies were on life microinsurance, particularly because life products are the most commonly sold type of microinsurance. A well-known study also suggests that the poor are very concerned about the financial risks of death, nearly as much as they are about health events.
Given that life microinsurance is both common and potentially greatly needed, why was there so little research on this topic? Life insurance is difficult to study because in any group, only a few deaths will occur in a given span of time, making it a very infrequent and random event. The policy world has also, perhaps, been skeptical about its value. Life microinsurance lacks the glamour of the promise of microcredit and the clear social good of savings. While health and agricultural microinsurance products are often developed with donor support as part of larger investments in health services, infrastructure, or agricultural inputs, life microinsurance is more often commercially driven.
We too began our research on the value for clients of life microinsurance with healthy skepticism, asking whether there really is financial value for clients from these products and if so, whether clients perceive them as valuable. Two years into our project, our results are promising, and even to ourselves, surprising. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Olivia Caverly, Microinsurance Network
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process, and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
The microinsurance sector has grown rapidly over the past 10 years and is expected to double by 2020, producing coverage for over 1 billion people. With it, this significant growth brings new and exciting innovations in products addressing health, agricultural, and property insurance, as well as new business models that find unique delivery methods to be sustainable.
Endowment Products Assist People to Finance Their Old Age
As life expectancy continues to rise globally, endowment products, which pay a lump sum upon maturity or death, are becoming more relevant. People need to find ways of financing their old age. Historically, standard endowment products have had limited uptake because of their lack of value compared to other saving options, mainly due to the high commissions that agents are paid. However, a new wave of products combining savings and insurance are becoming popular.
These new endowment products are more appealing to low-income clients because they counter the notion that investing the money is in “vain” when the insured event doesn’t happen. They do this by combining insurance with savings over time. Grameen Shakti, SBI Life Insurance’s product, for example, bundles a term life product that is the same price regardless of the age or gender of the policy holder, with a cash benefit on survival of the pre-determined policy term. The simple terms of the product, which include limited choices of term and of death benefit, help it reach a wider audience by allowing people who might be less familiar with insurance to better understand what they are paying for. Grameen Shakti is now offered throughout India (Rusconi).
Technology Plays a Key Role
Technology has proven to be a huge enabler for microinsurance distribution, especially through mobile telephones. This is particularly true for those microinsurance target customers who reside in rural and semi-urban areas of developing countries with limited access to traditional sales and management methods.
> Posted by Ignacio Mas, Independent Consultant
Google Trends is a public web facility which shows how often particular search terms are entered in Google relative to the total search volume, globally or for individual countries, and for defined time periods (after 2004). This gives us a good perspective into how people are approaching our industry. I looked up some of the most prominent financial inclusion terms, and found some very interesting things.
Industry rebranding. The first graph below shows that the search term “microfinance” has been much more popular than “microcredit” over the last eight years. (In each graph, all data points are scaled relative to the highest value on that graph – see methodological note at the end of this post.) “Microcredit” surged in late 2006 with the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus. Since then, searches on “microcredit” have been decreasing in relative terms and, by contrast, the new term “financial inclusion” has been gaining ground and is now comparable in its use as a search term to “microcredit.” Still, despite strong attempts from many quarters to rebrand around the financial inclusion label, it has not yet taken off.
Interview With Ross Beerman, AllLife
> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI
In South Africa, people living with HIV (about 18 percent of the population) are often unable to access basic financial services. AllLife, founded in 2004, provides life insurance and health management services to HIV-positive clients across income groups in South Africa. The company provides financial services, gives individual counseling, and facilitates access to health services. Recently AllLife Co-Founder and Managing Director Ross Beerman visited CFI and discussed AllLife’s unique model, why life insurance is vital to those with HIV in South Africa, and future opportunities for the company.
Why is it so important to provide life insurance to people living with HIV in South Africa?
If we look at the economically active, people who earn more than 500 dollars a month, we’re talking about 2.5 million people [in South Africa] living with HIV. If you get declined for life cover from a life insurance company, really what the company is telling you is that they don’t think that you’re going to live long enough for them to make a profit. Whether it’s HIV, or it’s cancer or something else, there are certain ways you behave if you think you’re terminally ill. You withdraw from your support structure… You don’t invest in long-term projects. That means that you don’t get educated, necessarily. You don’t buy a house. You don’t start a business… That’s what happens in South Africa.
> Posted by Adriana Magdas, Senior Associate, CFI
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.”
Low-income individuals need insurance at least as much as those with higher incomes, due to higher vulnerability and a smaller cushion of resources to draw upon in times of need. The good news is that the number of people covered by microinsurance rose from 78 million in 2007 to 135 million in 2009, and today, more generous estimates place that number at around 500 million.
If microinsurance has grown so rapidly, why worry about it?
First, because most of the market is still unreached. According to Lloyds, the actual market potential is somewhere between 1.5 and 3 billion. Recent growth is disproportionate, with 80 percent of the insured in Asia. Latin America has only 15 percent of the insured and Africa only 5 percent.
Second, because expanding the reach of microinsurance proves to be challenging. The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign and its partner, the Microinsurance Network, organized a webinar to discuss these challenges with microinsurance experts. From this conversation, three main lessons stuck with me. Microinsurance products must be:
> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor, CFI
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.”
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign begins with an audacious premise: that it is possible, if all the stars align, to achieve full financial inclusion for all with quality financial services by the year 2020. Yes, that would take quite a few stars to line up perfectly, but here are my top seven reasons for optimism as we work to advance inclusion.
1. There are more mobile phones than toothbrushes in the world today.
Bad news for dental health, but good news for billions of previously excluded clients who have access to a device that can include them in financial services if the mobile money folks play their cards right. With mobile subscriptions exceeding 86 percent of the global population, there is great promise if providers can figure out the business models.
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