Searching: Research & Analysis

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.

Agent Network Journeys Toward the Last Mile: A Cross-Country Perspective

CGAP's analysis reveals three distinct journeys country stakeholders have taken to extend the reach and quality of rural agent networks.

China's Alipay and WeChat Pay: Reaching Rural Users

This Brief explores the emergence, similarities, and differences between China's Alipay and WeChat Pay and the affects these elements may have on the way they compete in the rural arena.

Crowdfunding in China: The Financial Inclusion Dimension

Last year, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in China surpassed the US$100 billion threshold and confirmed China as the world’s largest P2P lending market, leaving North America a distant second. This tremendous growth was driven by a mix of circumstances.

Financial Inclusion, Stability, Integrity, and Protection: Philippines

Under the right circumstances, financial inclusion, stability, integrity, and consumer protection (collectively referred to as I-SIP) can be positively related, and the failure to consider any one of these objectives can lead to problems.

Development Finance Institutions and Financial Inclusion

It is time for DFIs to adopt an alternative approach to financial inclusion that prioritizes needed market changes. A shift to a market systems approach addresses this need and requires that DFIs carefully analyze each market to determine the key gaps, underlying causes, critical actors, and theory of change for bringing about sustainable market development.

Market Facilitation to Advance Financial Inclusion

The paper reviews how USAID, through two programs and in partnership with a series of market actors, helped change the microfinance market dynamics in the Philippines—from a specialized activity with limited outreach and highly dependent on subsidized credit, to a more inclusive and robust market-driven segment of the financial sector.

Using Behavioral Science

This Working Paper addresses qualitative research on how microentrepreneurs approach, decide, and act on key business and financial management issues.

Designing Digital Financial Services for Smallholder Families

This publication synthesizes learnings from across Zimbabwe, Senegal, Rwanda, and Cambodia, with the aim of providing financial service providers, donors, and other stakeholders with actionable insights into the ingredients for building successful, smallholder-specific digital financial services.

Mystery Shopping for Financial Services

This Technical Guide is designed to enable policy makers with jurisdiction over market conduct issues, consumer protection organizations, and development agencies to conduct mystery shopping exercises.