The coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis is first and foremost a public health crisis, but it is also threatening many people’s financial security. This is especially true for low-income families in developing countries. As reports of distress pour in from…
This blog series explores the role that financial services can play for displaced people. Topics include the demand for financial services among FDPs, disaster insurance, and cash transfers. The millions of refugees and people forcibly displaced…
Whether and how financial services improve the lives of low-income people remains the subject of intense debate despite decades of evidence-gathering. The evidence to date appears mixed and often contradictory. As a result, different factions in the…
This blog series explores how digital payment providers can unlock innovation in the digital finance ecosystem by selling open APIs to third-parties, empowering these companies to create new products and services that benefit providers, third-…
There are about 1 billion people between 15 and 24 years of age in the world’s less developed regions. As they grow into adulthood, they will need support from many sources – including parents, trusted mentors, and social networks – and a variety of…
What factors are shaping the future of financial inclusion and offer the most promise for improving the lives of poor people? In this series of Essays, CGAP’s leaders consider where the sector is heading, and which innovations hold the greatest…
Turkey currently holds the G20 presidency and has declared financial inclusion to be one of its presidency’s priorities as a powerful driver of inclusive growth. In this series, Olga Tomilova and Stefan Staschen share some of their impressions on…
What areas of financial inclusion are funders focusing on? Which countries are receiving the most funding? Are funders’ interventions making a difference? In this blog series, we look at data on international funding for financial inclusion and…
This 2016 series shares early insights on digital credit, a fast-moving area in financial product innovation. In this series, we highlight the new Introduction to Digital Credit materials developed by CGAP, along with experiments and…
CGAP's report "China: A New Paradigm in Branchless Banking" highlights the opportunities for greater financial inclusion through technology, specifically the use of agents and branchless banking. Despite dramatic poverty reduction over the past…
The stakes in achieving universal access to high-quality education are high, yet many children remain out of school. The financial challenges associated with paying school fees and covering the other costs of education contribute to this problem. In…
Roughly 1.1 billion people worldwide lack electricity, and almost 85 percent of those without power live in rural areas. Distributed energy solutions that leverage digital payments open up opportunities to reach millions of people at low cost. In…
GSMA's 2017 State of the Industry reports a global total of 5.3 million agents, an impressive sixfold increase over the 886,000 agents in existence just five years ago. However, the bulk of digital financial services (DFS) agents are in urban or…
About 700 million people lack a clean water source. One of the most difficult challenges in expanding access to clean water is helping water utilities become financially resilient in low-income areas, where revenue is generally low and…
Policymakers in emerging markets are only recently starting to use behavioral methods to address consumer protection challenges. Making financial markets fair for poor consumers can be difficult, but there are some straightforward ways in which…
This series of posts draws on two new pieces of research from Brazil, a survey on the use of agents from Bankable Frontier Associates, and a financial diaries project conducted by CGAP that covered 123 households, to describe the picture of…
The Russian Federation presents a picture of rapid and accelerating change in the financial inclusion landscape for lower income Russians in the years since transition to a market economy. Since 2008, when CGAP conducted its first research on the…
CGAP holds that smartphones are likely to become the main interface for mobile money use. A well-designed interface will drive growth, profitability and a much improved user experience.
Unlike clunky and clumsy hierarchical menu-driven interfaces (…
