Searching: Research & Analysis

Building Value in Microfinance Through Digitization: A Role for Funders

This note highlights the importance of funders in supporting the digital transformation of microfinance institutions (MFIs). The focus is on business intelligence and credit renewal automation to increase the success rate of MFI digitization. Funders play a crucial role in ensuring that MFIs continue to serve the most excluded and underserved customers in the future.

Building Value in Microfinance Through Digitization: Lessons from Loan Automation Pilots

Digitization has brought both hope and frustration to the microfinance industry. To address this, we identified and tested five core principles for successful implementation. This focus note summarizes our experience, evaluates the validity of the five principles, and offers key lessons learned for other industry stakeholders to adopt and scale a similar approach.

Young Women and Financial Services: Maximizing Impact

Research has shown that marginalized young women can benefit from financial services in both economic and non-economic ways. But with over half a billion women aged 15-24 in the world, the life stages, needs, and contexts of this population are tremendously diverse. Among which segments of young women could investments in improved financial services make the most impact? This infographic highlights findings from a recent CGAP segmentation exercise.

Business Her Own Way: Creating Livelihoods Through Informal Online Commerce

This Focus Note outlines the characteristics of IOC, maps the personas of the women who engage in it, and provides guidance to funders looking to support women to generate livelihoods through IOC.

Basic Regulatory Enablers for Digital Financial Services

CGAP shows how an enabling regulatory framework that is based on four enablers has contributed to advancing digital financial services in 10 countries.

National Survey and Segmentation of Smallholder Households in Bangladesh

CGAP conducted a nationally representative survey of smallholder households in Bangladesh in 2016. The survey explored the agricultural and nonagricultural activities, financial practices and interests, and challenges and aspirations of smallholder families in Bangladesh.

CGAP Smallholder Household Surveys: Bangladesh User Guide

This Data Set User's Guide provides information on the methodology used for the 2016 CGAP Smallholder Household Surveys in Bangladesh.

bKash Bangladesh: A Fast Start for Mobile Financial Services

bKash launched in the second half of 2011, grew to 2 million accounts by the end of 2012, and shot up to 11 million registered accounts by the end of 2013.

A Microcredit Crisis Averted: The Case of Bangladesh

After years of strong growth, the microfinance industry in Bangladesh was on the verge of a sharp change in direction, when the big 4 MFIs began to cut back on branches and staff in 2008.

Household Interviews in Bangladesh, 2013

As part of research for the CGAP Focus Note "A Microcredit Crisis Averted: The Case of Bangladesh," by Greg Chen and Stuart Rutherford, Rutherford and S. K. Sinha interviewed 43 low-income rural Bangladeshi households.