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> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
Today, people around the world are celebrating World Population Day, a day that seeks to bring attention to the importance of population issues in the context of development. The focus of this year’s event is adolescent pregnancy, with the aim to catalyze progress in securing a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.
There are currently roughly 600 million girls globally ages 10 to 19, 500 million of whom live in developing countries. Each year, 16 million teenage girls give birth, and an additional 3.2 million undergo unsafe abortions. Even though 90 percent of these teenagers giving birth are married, they still experience conditions contributing to challenging pregnancies: inadequate education, sexual coercion, violence, rights violations (including child- and forced-marriages), and gender inequality. In addition to lesser hardships that can come from unplanned or uninformed pregnancies, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death among girls ages 15 to 19 around the world.
The United Nations is calling for commitments from countries, communities, and individuals to support the provision of quality education for girls from primary school through adolescence, including age-appropriate, comprehensive education on sexuality and health. It’s been found that when a girl is educated, she is more likely to marry later, have children later, have healthier children, and earn a higher income. The UN also emphasizes the necessity for comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services. Other areas that demand examination are the legal systems surrounding marriage (including minimum marriage ages) and women’s rights.
As we have posted about previously (see here, here, and here), the low level of financial inclusion among youth is a missed opportunity to contribute to their well-being. Starting youth out with financial services can be a good investment. A New America Foundation study suggests that instilling a habit of saving among youth sets them on a course for a lifetime of financial capability. According to Youth Economic Opportunities, girls who are less financially dependent are at lower risk for negative effects of early pregnancy and child bearing. In a recent World Bank paper on gender equality and development, it was found that lack of agency (that is, a person’s capability to advance goals she values) is a key factor driving poor reproductive health outcomes among women generally. For example, women in Bangladesh who had more decision-making power were more likely to access prenatal services and skilled birthing accommodations.
> Posted by Maria Perdomo, YouthStart Programme Manager, UN Capital Development Fund
Opening a bank account in Senegal gave me first-hand experience in how a bank can fail to apply the client protection principle on transparency. On my visit to open the account, I spent one hour waiting and another hour completing forms and asking the sales representative questions. When I decided that I had spent too much time trying to understand exactly what fees were associated with the account, I asked the representative for a brochure that explained it all. She looked at me as if I were speaking another language because, in fact, the bank did not have a single document disclosing all the fees associated with the account. So there I was, writing down all the fees the representative could remember. In the end—and after a lot of probing—together we estimated that I would have to spend about US$30 (CFAF 15,000) to open the account and then US$10 to US$15 on monthly fees! But, of course, I would not know exactly how much I was paying in fees before receiving my first statement.
A couple of months later, I went to visit a financial service provider in Uganda and interviewed the group of young women and girls that you can see in the photo. I was completely taken by how these empowered young women were saving in their individual accounts as little as 1,000 Uganda shillings (US$0.39) per week. For them, every penny counts, and they can only afford saving in an institution that is transparent about its fees and responsible about its pricing. Seeing this group of young women and girls, in contrast with my not-so-positive experience at the bank, reinforced my commitment to client protection for youth, who are among the most vulnerable clients.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on the Huffington Post World Blog.
The High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, led by David Cameron, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has released its recommendations for the next round of world development goals. This document launches what is sure to be a lively debate that will take place in the coming months, as the United Nations considers this report and prepares for the Secretary General to announce the official U.N. recommendations later this fall.
The Eminent Persons panel put forward twelve illustrative goals, ranging from 1) End Poverty to 12) Create a Global Enabling Environment, and touching in between on health, education, water, energy, and other priorities.
For those in my line of work, the immediate question is: How does the report position financial inclusion?
In recent months, when the subject of financial inclusion and the Post -2015 Global Development Goals (GDGs) comes up, someone is sure to say, “Financial services aren’t development goals; they’re enablers.” And this is the crux of a dilemma. The importance of financial inclusion is increasingly recognized. But if financial services are seen through an “enabler” lens, they would not appear in the top tier of GDGs, which revolve around outcomes of intrinsic value to people and nations. What is the role of an enabler like financial inclusion in a development framework that focuses on outcomes?
It looks like the Eminent Persons recognized this dilemma, and as a result, they had a hard time finding the right place for financial inclusion. They did address it, finally, by tucking it under proposed goal 8) Create Jobs, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Equitable Growth. Specifically, sub-goal 8c says, “Strengthen productive capacity by providing universal access to financial services and infrastructure such as transportation and ICT.” They put it into a section that is mainly about job creation, and then linked it to physical and communications infrastructure. Another sub-goal (2c) calls for equal rights for women to open bank accounts (along with the right to own property and sign contracts), implying that financial services are a necessary part of an economic identity.
> 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 Henry Jackelen, Jackelen Associates
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
We’ve always known that microcredit is not a panacea.
During the heady days of the microcredit revolution in the 1980s and 90s, I was part of a veritable village of practitioners. It was a remarkable group of driven, passionate, and often iconoclastic individuals. We lived in our own Utopia, defining and inventing the concept of social enterprise. But even then we knew that our microcredit efforts weren’t perfect.
When I first visited Bangladesh in 1983, my role was to review the Grameen and BRAC programs as part of developing a new World Bank program (which proposed what became known as the Palli Karma Shayak Foundation or PKSF, a successful Apex for MFIs). Read the rest of this entry »
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