Recent Blogs
Blog
Building India’s Model of Agent Banking
CGAP, in collaboration with the College of Agricultural Banking, just completed a national survey, which captured the big picture on agents across the country. In India, the term customer service point (CSP) is used to refer to individuals who act as agents on behalf of banks.Blog
Exclusion Costs: Financial Inclusion in the Arab World
Arab policymakers, who long regarded microfinance as charity for the poor, are realizing that a financial system that serves only 20 percent of the population is a key ingredient in the recipe for political instability.Blog
Small-balance Savings Accounts: Be Careful What We Wish For?
There is an underappreciated issue in the admirable push to help expand outreach and access to savings accounts amongst the poor: the potential that a savings account, if not suited to an individual’s financial profile, can actually wipe out much of a poor person’s financial assets in a year, or even a few months.Blog
Practitioners and the Global Findex Data
With the release by Gallup and the World Bank of the Global Findex (Financial Inclusion Index), the path to financial inclusion has just been made a little easier to travel.Blog
Microfinance for Water: An Example of Client-Focused Innovation
As Michael Porter and other insightful business thinkers have emphasized, excessive focus on short-term financial performance while ignoring customer and community well-being distorts decision making, inhibits innovation and ultimately limits financial success.Blog
Diversity Is In
Moving clients to the center of the microfinance discourse is producing new data on who they are and how they use (or could use) financial services.Blog
Understanding the Financial Needs of Poor Mexicans
In a perfect market for micro-financial intermediation, product offerings would reflect the distinct needs of a diverse clientele.Blog
Brazil Launches Action Plan for Financial Inclusion Initiative
Princess Máxima highlighted the success of the Business Correspondent (BC) model in the country and its notable results in expanding access to financial services to all municipalities.Blog
The Role of Markets in Rural and Agricultural Finance
With more than 50% of the developing world’s population living in rural areas and global commodity prices on the rise again, there is growing awareness of the need for the development community to work in tandem with the private sector.Blog
Interest Rates: What Are the Lessons from Russia on "How Much Is Too Much?"
The situation in Russia and other countries is now leading us to want to revisit each of these factors, “deconstructing” the concept of “sustainable” interest rates and review factors, to see if this process sheds some light on whether any given interest rate can be considered responsible.Blog
Mobile Banking Ekosystem in India
Mobile banking is just one of the reasons India is a place to watch for innovations in financial inclusion. This short film profiles one such innovation, Eko, to see how businesses chasing the fortune at the base of the pyramid are serving the needs of poor customers in India.Blog
More than Semantics: From “Microcredit” to “Financial Inclusion
Over the past 15 years, the field that CGAP aspires to advance has broadened from the initial focus on microcredit to microfinance, to access-to-finance, and most recently financial inclusion.Blog
Unlocking the Potential of Mobile Money in New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a country so complex it defies easy description. A place of such diversity it hosts 850 distinct languages for a population of about 7 million. The population figure, mind you, is only a guess as nobody really knows.Blog
Can the Microfinance Sector Help Deliver Clean Energy?
Offering financial products that enable poor clients to purchase clean, low-carbon alternatives to kerosene, firewood and other conventional fuels is perhaps the most direct way in which microfinance can be mobilized to combat climate change and preserve ecological resources.Blog
Exorbitant Interest Rates:A Response from the Russian Microfinance Industry
The exorbitant interest rates offered by so-called “microlending” companies (who look much more like payday lenders or garden variety loan sharks) to clients of the Russian Post recently gave rise to a wave of indignation on the part of the public, government, mass media and the responsible microfinance industry.Blog
The Global Findex: Filling A Major Gap in the Data Landscape
We believe both policy making and private sector decision making is much improved when it is rooted in rigorous research and analysis. Better evidence can improve outcomes in a number of ways:Blog
What is the Telecom Regulator’s Role in Fostering Mobile Money?
Mobile money feels right for mobile network operators (MNOs): it is an extension of the basic prepaid platform and distribution networks they already operate. Mobile money does require greater surveillance against fraud and money laundering measures, but it’s all fundamentally about secure messaging.Blog
India’s Microfinance Industry: An Anatomy of Risk for April 2012
With around 20 million borrower accounts estimated for March 2012, India still has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world. However, in March 2012 it also had the dubious distinction of having perhaps the worst portfolio quality in the world (at the national level).Blog
Interest Rates on Microloans in Russia: How Much Is Too Much?
Just as the dust settled after a controversial entrance of new players in the Russian microfinance sector about a year ago – those claiming themselves to be ”microfinance organizations” and yet charging 730% interest per annum, another “innovative microfinance” product has totally shocked visitors of the Russian Post, as reflected in a multitude of blogs and in numerous media articles published in recent weeks.Blog