Saida, a founder of an agricultural enterprise, started as a farmer in central Uganda growing sorghum, millet, and rice. A few years ago, she decided to buy equipment to process her crops. Demand increased, and she began buying raw materials from others and processing them as well, slowly growing her business year after year. Saida is now ready to grow even more: her plans include hiring more laborers, renting more storage units, and possibly buying a small plot of land from a neighbor.

Things are looking up for Saida and her family, but there is one challenge she has not yet overcome: financing for business growth. She is struggling to find a financial service provider that lends to small agricultural businesses and understands the opportunities that agriculture brings.

Agriculture plays a significant role in the GDP of Uganda, and ABC Finance, a lender operating in the country, sees broad investment potential. However, ABC Finance finds it challenging to lend to small, agricultural businesses because they cannot confidently measure the risks involved. They request a lot of information upfront to better understand these businesses, but oftentimes these small business owners are not able to provide sufficient documentation to move forward. As a result, ABC Finance continues to finance its existing pool of agricultural businesses, primarily those working with cash crops and in formal markets that request large loan amounts. Moreover, as a result of COVID-19, ABC Finance is focused on renewing loans for existing partners and only financing a limited number of new agri-SMEs because ABC are not able to conduct thorough, on-site due diligence.
<blockquote class="blockquote">A $65 billion financing gap for agri-SMEs means three out of four agri-SMEs don't have the necessary finance to grow.</blockquote>
Businesses like Saida’s are not alone in their struggles to secure loans. There is an estimated USD $65 billion financing gap for agri-SMEs, which means three out of four agri-SMEs don't have the necessary finance to grow. For those agri-SMEs that make it to a lender's radar, CFI and <a href="https://scopeinsight.com/">SCOPEinsight</a> research found that lenders spend an inordinate amount of time and resources sourcing businesses and assessing their bankability, making the process of pre-screening and assessment expensive and leaving out the opportunity for many agri-SMEs to receive lending.

Given some of these limitations, how can ABC Finance easily determine if Saida runs a “bankable” agri-SME?
<h2>The Challenges of Determining an Agri-SME’s Bankability</h2>
In 2020, CFI and SCOPEinsight, as part of our partnership with <a href="https://agra.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">AGRA</a>, researched over 90 lenders and industry actors and mapped SCOPEinsight and <a href="https://csaf.org/">CSAF</a> data to understand the driving factors behind the significant financing gap. Our research pointed to information – the information requested by lenders and the ability of agri-SMEs to provide information to lenders – as one of the most important obstacles to assessing the creditworthiness of agri-SMEs.
<blockquote class="pullquote--right">Lenders tend to gravitate toward larger businesses and stick with lending to businesses they already know.</blockquote>
Lenders typically collect a long list of information during the pre-due diligence (i.e. screening) phase of a deal. That information often includes generic business metrics and other metrics related to the agriculture sector or social and environmental impact. Many agri-SME’s, particularly smaller enterprises and those that operate in informal markets, struggle to provide formal documentation of their business activities. This is further complicated by the fact that the type of information requested varies significantly from lender to lender, making it difficult for agri-SMEs to prioritize what they should be documenting. As a result, lenders tend to gravitate toward larger businesses operating in formal markets and stick with lending to the businesses they already know.
<h2>Bankability Metrics Address the Information Obstacle</h2>
To address this information challenge, we developed a set of standardized bankability metrics that can serve as a common language between lenders and agri-SMEs. The metrics are intended to be used during pre-due diligence, providing lenders with an overview of the agri-SME's activity that is enough for them to decide whether to continue with due diligence or not. At the same time, standardized metrics will provide agri-SMEs with clear expectations about lenders’ requirements and help them prepare for an assessment more quickly and efficiently. The metrics will reduce the time needed to conduct pre-due diligence and open opportunities to expand lending to the many high-potential agri-SMEs that currently struggle to secure financing.

The bankability metrics focus on business activity, financial performance, management capacity, and governance. The team analyzed the wide variety of metrics used by lenders to identify metrics with the greatest common ground and those that are most effective in screening for creditworthiness. Each lender has a unique risk appetite, so the metrics do not identify benchmarks for bankability, but rather provide a common set of metrics whereby each lender can apply their own assessment to determine creditworthiness.

The Challenge of Bringing Agri-SMEs and Lenders Closer Together

Sub-Saharan Africa

Agricultural and Rural Finance

Credit

Credit Provision

Entrepreneurs of MSMEs

Underserved Groups

Smallholder Farmers

Blog Post

Many have compared the steps required to overcome COVID-19 with those taken in previous economic crises or <a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusion.org/pandemics-and-natural-disasters-what-can-we-learn-from-past-disasters-to-help-with-todays-pandemic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">natural disasters</a>, whereby the situation follows a similar pattern consisting of three stages: triage, stabilize, recover. While there is some applicability to the current COVID-19 pandemic, it implies a sequence and limited duration that may not truly characterize the nature of the challenges we now face. The reality is that COVID-19 is a more persistent phenomenon that may continue to ebb and flow for some time before it is fully under control.

Given the more entrenched and global nature of this crisis, it is likely that the consequences will be more varied and run deeper than what we have seen in past crises. To help get a sense of what these consequences may be for those who are most vulnerable, we asked a few members of CFI’s <a href="https://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/people/advisory-council" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Advisory Council</a> to share some brief thoughts on what they see as the biggest implications of COVID-19 and the ways in which the inclusive finance sector can address them.
<h2>Camilla Nestor, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University</h2>
From my perspective, one of the biggest implications of COVID-19 is on food security for countries and populations that were already vulnerable. Before COVID-19, the world’s estimated 500 million smallholder farmers were one of the most financially underserved segments, with an estimated <a href="https://www.raflearning.org/post/covid-19-emergency-briefing-agri-smes-operating-uncertain-financial-operational-and-supply" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$100 billion lending gap</a> in Africa alone.

As a result of COVID-19, smallholder farmers are dealing with significant volatility in demand for both cash crops and food crops, challenges securing the necessary inputs, and limits on accessing markets. On top of this, they are also facing reductions in access to already-scarce capital. If unaddressed, this lack of capital will directly impact their ability to produce food. We see that commercial lenders are pulling back on lending to agriculture; <a href="https://csaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CSAF_State_of_Sector_2020_Summary_FINAL.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cross-border social lending</a> is flat; and supply chain financing is at risk – for example, in a recent <a href="https://www.afap-partnership.org/covid-19-impact-assessment-on-the-agrismes-and-farming-communities-of-ghana-malawi-mozambique-tanzania-and-uganda/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">survey</a> of 5 markets in Africa, farmers noted reduced access to both supplier credit and trade credit since the onset of the pandemic.
<blockquote>With smallholder farming contributing up to 80% of the food supplies in some regions, there is significant risk to food security at both a household level and a national level.</blockquote>
With smallholder farming contributing <a href="https://www.ifad.org/documents/38714170/40706188/Smallholders+can+feed+the+world_e.pdf/460ca6c2-7621-40d8-9f79-a56f6f8fa75e" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">up to 80%</a> of the food supplies in some regions, there is significant risk to food security at both a household level and a national level. This is an opportunity for the financial inclusion community and agricultural finance experts to come together to develop short-term and longer-term mechanisms to ensure that financing flows to this critical segment.
<h2>Mark Pickens, Senior Director of Social Impact at Visa</h2>
We need to step up for small and micro businesses as they are the backbone of the global economy. Unless they remain resilient and grow, most economies are going to suffer because small businesses typically account for half of all jobs and GDP. The challenge is even greater with women-owned small businesses, which face many challenges, including lack of access to capital.
<blockquote>Key factors to building resiliency will include how small and micro businesses digitize payments, access other financial services, and skill-up to operate in an increasingly digital economy.</blockquote>
Key factors to building resiliency will include how small and micro businesses digitize payments, access other financial services, and skill-up to operate in an increasingly digital economy. Earlier this year the Visa Foundation announced $210 million to help small businesses. Visa also launched online toolkits via Small Business Hubs in 20 countries, expanded our Practical Business Skills portal for a greater geographic reach, and committed to digitally enable 50 million small businesses as we collectively recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
<h2>Joanna Ledgerwood, Independent Consultant</h2>
It has been well-documented that the COVID-19 crisis has disproportionately affected women and girls. In most countries, social norms dictate that women bear primary responsibility for feeding and caring for their families and managing the household. With children not able to attend school and sick family members needing care, women have increased responsibilities, exacerbating an already heavy workload. The result is women have less time for paid work, and because of the pandemic, less access to informal financial services such as savings groups or local shop credit to help them through.
<blockquote>This pandemic provides an opportunity to proactively promote women’s empowerment.</blockquote>
However, this pandemic provides an opportunity to proactively promote women’s empowerment and advance household food security. Understanding how women and men are impacted differently by the pandemic, as well as the risks, constraints and hardships women face and their specific needs, requires the collection and analysis of sex-disaggregated data. This data can help to design appropriate programs and policies and inform financial products and delivery channels to effectively reach women.

For example, providing digital cash transfers directly to women increases their chances of receiving and controlling money to meet household needs, which in turn is likely to lead to greater bargaining power at home. The use of sex-disaggregated data can help to design programs that mitigate unintended consequences of cash transfers such as increased domestic violence. In addition, G2P programs that take gender biases into account can enhance women’s resilience to future economic shocks and can influence change to social norms over the long-term. Now is the time to ensure that women’s increased responsibilities and reduced ability to earn income will not further widen the gender gap in financial inclusion that existed long before this pandemic.
<h2>David Ferrand, Independent Consultant</h2>
Much depends, I think, on factors beyond financial inclusion. The indications remain rather positive that the health impact on Africa will be relatively bearable, notwithstanding the tragic loss of life. But we still don’t know yet the eventual economic cost to Africa, either in absolute terms or in how it will be distributed. There is a very real concern that the recovery from the crisis could see the micro and smaller scale business sectors re-emerging significantly disadvantaged relative to larger scale. And many people who have lost their livelihoods in the crisis may end up in long-term poverty traps.
<blockquote>Only governments have the balance sheets necessary to bear the risks involved.</blockquote>
There are financial sector providers positioned to play a pivotal role in restoring liquidity to communities and investing in rebuilding. But it would be unrealistic to expect that financial sector players can do this alone. There needs to be a new partnership between the financial sector, communities, and governments. Only governments have the balance sheets necessary to bear the risks involved – but they need help from across the financial system in providing the support where it is needed.

Over the longer term, there is also a need for genuine innovation in developing solutions to deal with the human and economic losses. Digital transformation has extraordinary potential, both now and in the future, to change our societies and ultimately lead to ever greater economic, social and cultural integration of countries and the world. The best-case scenario is that the COVID-19 crisis could lead to our harnessing digital finance to empower the rebuilding and development of local communities. But this is going to require bold, swift and pragmatic action.

Implications of COVID-19 for the Most Vulnerable: A Snapshot of Views from CFI’s Advisory Council

Advisory Council

Our People

Test of a Lifetime: COVID-19 and Financial Inclusion

Challenges and Crises

Enabling Environment

Digital Credit

Digital Financial Services

Delivery Channels

MSME/SME Finance

Policy, Regulation and Government Initiatives

Supply Chain Finance

Women

Prior to the onset of COVID-19, very few of us would have foreseen a pandemic spreading so rapidly across the world, forcing governments to take actions like lockdowns and border closures. We have observed how these events found many essential services unprepared and resulted in businesses focusing on “response” and “recovery.” In many countries, the pandemic started as a health crisis, while in Sub-Saharan Africa it started as an <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/video/2020/04/21/africas-pulse-covid-19-coronavirus-causes-first-recession-in-25-years" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">economic one</a>, as closures happened quicker than the virus spread.

Despite the fact that many agricultural value chains are considered an essential service, agri-SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa are still facing a <a href="https://www.raflearning.org/post/covid-19-emergency-briefing-agri-smes-operating-uncertain-financial-operational-and-supply" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">decline in demand</a> (particularly those providing farm inputs), <a href="https://csaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CSAF_State_of_Sector_2020_Summary_FINAL.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">liquidity shortfalls</a>, harvesting and production problems due to labor shortages, <a href="https://csaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CSAF_State_of_Sector_2020_FINAL.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">export and transportation delays due to lockdowns</a>, and cancelled international contracts. All these challenges are exacerbated by ongoing climate change-related shocks, like droughts, floods and <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/locust-plague-climate-science-east-africa/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">locust plagues</a>. The resilience of agri-SMEs (small and medium-sized businesses that are formal and registered entities engaged in agricultural production) is being tested with these events.

While it is too early to estimate the full economic impact of COVID-19 on agri-SMEs, most lenders are taking steps to address the most pressing challenges faced by these agri-SMEs. Though it is prudent to move quickly to overcome these challenges, agri-SMEs would be better supported in the long run if lenders approach these problems through a systemic lens to understand the root of the challenges instead of focusing only on the symptoms of the overall shock.

Aside from the lack of infrastructure, agri-SMEs’ biggest challenge to growth is their limited access to finance and the regulatory burdens constraining this access. As will be discussed below, these challenges are deeper and more structurally embedded, and therefore require a long-term coordinated commitment to provide agri-SMEs access to capital.

This post highlights steps lenders are currently taking to help agri-SMEs weather the storm and suggests areas where they can expand their focus to support these businesses in being better prepared for future economic shocks.
<h2>Explore new options to mitigate risk and increase capital flow to agri-SMEs</h2>
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, most lenders have focused on serving existing clients by increasing their financing, restructuring loans, or deferring payments to meet their clients’ liquidity challenges. By doing so, lenders are also making sure their current portfolio is not at immediate risk.
<blockquote>It’s essential that lenders offer non-traditional options to mitigate risks and increase the flow of capital to agri-SMEs.</blockquote>
While lenders may be tempted to take a more conservative stance, those with sufficient capacity should be initiating even more new deals in order for agri-SMEs to keep goods and services flowing through the highly interdependent agricultural value chain. For instance, <a href="https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/0f453d56-7fef-4823-8cd2-b2bd02773603/page/TP9WB" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">72% of MSEs in Zambia</a> need working capital to continue and grow their business, and <a href="https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/0f453d56-7fef-4823-8cd2-b2bd02773603/page/TP9WB" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">61% are running on their savings</a>. COVID-19 is exacerbating the financing gap, and it’s essential that lenders offer non-traditional options to mitigate risks and increase the flow of capital to agri-SMEs.

Luckily, lenders have successful examples which they can use to build new and more innovative risk mitigation options. Credit guarantees, such as non-bank financial instruments that mitigate default risk for lenders in Sub-Saharan Africa, are a known practice. Between 2008 and 2015, AGRA worked with several partners to offer several guarantees to extend credit to many agriculture value chain actors in Africa, demonstrating the bankability and feasibility of investing in perceived risky agricultural businesses. Additionally, <a href="https://aceliafrica.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Aceli Africa</a> has developed a new market platform that aims to incentivize financial service providers to lend to agri-SMEs while also providing technical assistance to them.
<h2>Create new strategies to find and support agri-SMEs</h2>
Many agricultural lenders are reporting that servicing new clients has either stopped or dropped to low levels, not just because of risk concerns, but also because it is almost impossible to conduct thorough due diligence without on-site visits. Given that on-site visits may not be feasible in the near-future, lenders will want to design creative strategies and leverage data to support remote discovery of new agri-SMEs.
<blockquote>Promising agri-SMEs will become more visible to lenders by providing a common set of standard bankability metrics.</blockquote>
To this end, in early 2020, MIX and SCOPEinsight formed a partnership with the support of AGRA to help address the financing gap agri-SMEs face. Through this partnership, they are <a href="https://www.themix.org/news-blog/mix-and-scopeinsight-launch-partnership-with-agra" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">building bankability metrics</a> so that agricultural lenders can identify and pre-screen agri-SMEs. These metrics play an even more important role now due to COVID-19 disruptions, and they will feed into a portal which will bridge the information gap between agri-SMEs and lenders. As a result, promising agri-SMEs will become more visible to lenders by providing a common set of standard bankability metrics that lenders can use to reduce their costs to serve SMEs. By employing bankability metrics, lenders will be able to assess the potential for growth of agri-SMEs, which currently handle <a href="https://agrf.org/dealroom/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AGRA-AGRF-Deal-Room-talk-by-Tom-Reardon-july20-2020-final-sent.pptx" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">680 million tons of food in Africa</a>.
<h2>Offer appropriate technical assistance to agri-SMEs</h2>
<blockquote>The key to this kind of support is that it offers business development assistance that is based on a high knowledge of the value chains and challenges.</blockquote>
Several of the lenders we spoke with are increasingly providing technical assistance to agri-SMEs, recognizing that in these extraordinary times, agri-SMEs are looking for direction. Lenders are offering guidance and training on financial management, crisis management, and operating a business with limited resources. After conducting a <a href="https://rootcapital.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/COVID-19-client-survey-report_JUNE-2020.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">survey on COVID-19's impact on 134 of its clients</a>, Root Capital decided to offer virtual technical support through its advisory team in four areas: crisis management, emergency operations, financial management and analysis, and digital data collection and analysis.

While technical assistance is not new and is already being offered to SMEs by many organizations, the key to this kind of support is that it offers business development assistance that is based on a high knowledge of the value chains and challenges, with the main goal to support agri-SMEs to grow and become bankable organizations. Helping agri-SMEs become more bankable, and thus more professionalized and visible to other lenders, can assist them to overcome barriers to financing and become more resilient and better equipped to face future risks and shocks.

Going forward, the uncertainty of this pandemic makes it unclear how the next season or harvest will affect agri-SMEs, who are <a href="https://www.raflearning.org/post/covid-19-emergency-briefing-agri-smes-operating-uncertain-financial-operational-and-supply" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">highly interdependent actors in an agricultural value chain</a> where one simple disruption in the flow of goods and services creates challenges for other actors. Along with prioritizing their existing clients, as they are currently doing, lenders could consider the crisis an opportunity to employ long-term strategies that can help agri-SMEs grow into resilient institutions. Coordinated responses and actions by lenders and other actors will play a critical role in ensuring that these businesses are strong enough to continue to feed the world in the face of new pandemics and other global challenges to come.

&nbsp;

From Crisis to Opportunity: How Can Lenders Help Build Resilient Agri-SMEs

Resilience

Financial Health

Responsible Investing

Impact Investing

The coronavirus pandemic has continued to ravage Western countries and is encroaching in a much more aggressive way into developing economies in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In developing countries where the vast majority of the labor force is in the informal economy (estimated at <a href="https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_627189/lang--en/index.htm">over 60 percent</a> worldwide), COVID-19 is revealing the limits of individual financial behaviors for coping with the pandemic. This raises questions: Which public policy measures should be prioritized to support resilience? What are the economic policies that are creating the underlying vulnerability and marginalization in the first place?
<blockquote>Which public policy measures should be prioritized to support resilience? What economic policies are creating underlying vulnerability and marginalization?</blockquote>
COVID-19 is revealing that no matter the degree of someone’s financial cushion in the form of savings or remittance networks, it is simply not sufficient to cover a loss of income. From a research perspective, no matter how much information we obtain on someone’s behaviors, attitudes and circumstances, we will not be able to have visibility into their vulnerability to shocks, as these issues only marginally contribute to someone’s resilience. To be better equipped to understand the impact of shocks such as COVID-19 on the lives of the BOP, we need to understand critical variables such as income, wealth and safety nets available to them. This means we need to adapt the financial health measurement tools that were previously developed to serve the narrower purpose of helping providers understand the financial health of their customers. These frameworks were tailored to the information that providers needed to know and the tools available to them to improve the resilience of their customers. Broader contextual variables, like safety nets, let alone income variables, were not part of the equation as FSPs do not have the mandate to address these larger policy issues.
<h2>Need to Ask Bigger Questions</h2>
But for many of us working in the inclusive finance space, our toolbox is bigger. Advocacy on public policy is squarely within our mandate and having the right information to inform this advocacy work should be integral to the types of research work we undertake. Demand-side research such as the <a href="https://globalfindex.worldbank.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Findex</a>, <a href="http://finmark.org.za/programmes/finscope/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Finscope</a>, financial diaries, and the new crop of financial health surveys, all reveal a similar story. They tell us that being poor is bad and poverty <a href="https://cenfri.org/news-and-events/webinar-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-financial-health" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">limits people’s resilience to shocks</a>. These demand-side tools don’t tell us much about the underlying causes of this lack of resilience. So, narrowing our research efforts only to demand-side data can be misleading. Too often actors draw the wrong inference from it: that people’s behaviors and attitudes are the reason for their poverty or vulnerability, even though this has long been <a href="https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/development-jargon-helping-people-help-themselves" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">discredited</a>. Focusing only on what providers can do is also too narrow in scope: the ideology that markets can solve all problems has also been pronounced dead by many economists, including the Nobel Laureate <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/30/neoliberalism-must-be-pronouced-dead-and-buried-where-next" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Joseph Stiglitz</a>.
<blockquote>The economic fallout of this pandemic can’t be solved through any individual choices or actions or a ready-made market solution.</blockquote>
The economic fallout of this pandemic can’t be solved through any individual choices or actions or a ready-made market solution. We need to ask bigger questions around why people are vulnerable to economic shocks in the first place and the role of the financial system in addressing this vulnerability. How are public policy, social safety nets, systemic discrimination or other underlying issues influencing people’s financial health circumstances? What would make people resilient and how should the financial system be set up to improve resilience and well-being for the BOP? There is really no amount of planning and sound financial management that would be sufficient under these circumstances. For systemic shocks like COVID-19, we need other research tools and a different body of evidence.
<h2>Creating Financial Protections for the BOP</h2>
We should be thinking about the systems that undergird the financial system and how to use it to create financial protections for the BOP. There are at least three priorities that COVID-19 has revealed for the inclusive finance field. I argue that these should be elevated in our collective research and evidence-gathering agendas.
<h3>1. Strengthening the ability to distribute payments</h3>
If nothing else, this pandemic has made it clear that countries with robust digital payment infrastructures can quickly get money out to people who are most in need. It is heartening that countries like <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/adc604f6-7999-11ea-bd25-7fd923850377?accessToken=zwAAAXF1NqZAkdOtxgT2eZkR6tO9JX_ZI4UDdw.MEYCIQCq8LPiLCFzDU973kkOf7P9UFkYEYGATGjkdNeE4ORSaAIhAMR64HuZniONRGR2qjVaFlZm78iaJRht2C1EKlVruFsQ&amp;sharetype=gift?token=5f6d3c51-58ac-46c1-a629-fc74a677c3b2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Togo</a> are taking action to get money into people’s hands using digital payments. Pakistan’s <a href="https://nation.com.pk/09-Apr-2020/payments-under-ehsaas-emergency-cash-programme-started" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ehsaas Emergency Cash Transfer Program</a> is able to disburse to over 12 million families hardest hit by COVID-19. <a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusion.org/mobile-money-in-times-of-crisis-an-unlikely-hero/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jordan has taken impressive steps </a>to expedite reforming electronic customer due diligence, expanding the cash in cash out (CICO) networks and other reforms to use a digital channel to disburse aid. These cash transfers are not only a critical lifeline for those most impacted by COVID-19, they also serve as a demonstration of the importance of the financial system for crisis response and for economic recovery. The challenge will be for those countries that do not yet have robust digital infrastructures or where there are still many limitations to getting certain groups -- like women or the elderly -- to engage with these digital channels. The inclusive finance community should focus its problem-solving skills on answering:
<ul>
 	<li>What will it take to extend digital infrastructure quickly? How can donors and investors partner with policymakers to make this a priority?</li>
 	<li>What are quickly scalable, second-best solutions for cash distribution in markets without digital infrastructure? Can MFIs, postal networks, and other community groups serve this last mile distribution?</li>
</ul>
<h3>2. Improving financial protection through “safety net-like” insurance</h3>
Prior to COVID-19, the role of insurance in the inclusive finance field was perceived as good to have or a problem of the health sector, but not the primary focus of our field. The challenge of commercializing micro-insurance was the main obstacle limiting progress. COVID-19 reveals the clear inadequacy of our solution set to date. The concept of employer-backed private insurance in situations where millions of employees are losing their jobs (an estimated <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/3-5-million-workers-likely-lost-their-employer-provided-health-insurance-in-the-past-two-weeks/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">3.5 million in the US alone</a>) is fundamentally flawed; and this has always been the case in developing countries where the vast majority of the BOP has never had a formal employer in the first place, let alone employee-backed private insurance. We must start to see universal health insurance as part of the solution set for inclusive finance. And beyond health insurance, we should be looking for public-private solutions for other types of protections like unemployment insurance or disaster insurance. The inclusive finance community should be focusing on answering:
<ul>
 	<li>What are the private-public models that can be deployed to scale micro-insurance?</li>
 	<li>What are other ways we can reimagine safety nets to leverage private-sector insurers and balance the costs for policymakers and employers?</li>
</ul>
<h3>3. Linking food producers to the financial system</h3>
In <a href="https://larepublica-pe.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/larepublica.pe/economia/2020/04/09/atender-la-emergencia-en-lo-rural-por-carolina-trivelli/?outputType=amp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">La Republica</a> (in Spanish), Carolina Trivelli sounds the alarm bells on food security in Peru. Immediate demand reductions on one side of the value chain are having longer term effects on small producers who are at risk of not getting the seeds, fertilizer and other inputs they need to plant for the next season. A different but also compelling call to action comes from Maha Agriculture Public Co., Ltd., in Myanmar. In an effort to limit the spread of the virus, government policy is <a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusion.org/diary-of-a-myanmar-based-agri-focused-fsp-responding-to-the-covid-19-crisis/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">inadvertently shutting down the financial services providers</a> who are financing critical food production cycles. Maintaining the flow of capital to farmers, regardless of the pandemic, is paramount for all of us if we want to see food at the grocery store in six months and not allow the effects of the pandemic to include food shortages and starvation. The questions that are priority for our collective attention include:
<ul>
 	<li>How can we ensure that money is flowing to food producers? How can we expand work on value chain finance in critical food commodity value chains? Is there specific data that can increase investment to value chain finance? Are there important actors, like buyers or distributors, with whom our community needs to engage?</li>
 	<li>What would it take to support the FSPs that serve agricultural producers? How can we ensure the business continuity of agricultural cooperatives or other financial service providers that serve the agricultural sector?</li>
</ul>
The complexity and gravity of the impact of COVID-19 are demanding that we not only respond immediately, but also reflect deeply on what we prioritize as a community in the future. Do you agree with the ideas put forward here? Let us know what you think.

COVID-19 Reveals the Limits of Individual Action and Market-Based Solutions

Health Insurance

Insurance

WASHINGTON, DC, August 27, 2019 – The Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion (CFI) has launched an executive education program for financial service providers serving low-income communities in emerging markets. Through peer learning and exchange, the <a href="/about/what-we-do/board-leadership-for-impact-program">Board Leadership for Impact Program</a> will empower executives and board members to foster client centricity, lead digital transformation, sustain business growth and drive social impact. In partnership with the <a href="https://www.citigroup.com/citi/foundation/">Citi Foundation</a> and <a href="https://www.fmo.nl/">FMO</a>, the Dutch development bank, supporting program implementation and participant scholarships, the Board Leadership for Impact Program will offer multiple in-person workshops per year coupled with a robust virtual portal.

Derived from CFI’s five-year <a href="https://content.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/about/what-we-do/africa-board-fellowship-program/">Africa Board Fellowship Program</a>, which fostered the growth and development of more than 300 executives and board members of financial service providers serving more than 10 million clients in Africa, the Board Leadership for Impact Program will now expand to include early stage to mature companies offering financial services to underserved customers that operate in emerging markets around the world.

“Our experience with leadership development through peer exchange will inform our efforts through this new program to cultivate a community of leaders who have the skills and the network to help their organizations thrive,“ said <a href="/bio/deborah-drake">Deborah Drake</a>, Vice President, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion. “Tackling challenges like achieving sustainable growth or pursuing digital transformation, particularly as a mission-driven organization, takes strategic leadership at the board level.”

Through role play, simulations and facilitated discussion, participants will gain new perspectives, skills, and knowledge on topics critical to social enterprise growth and impact, including risk management, board dynamics, digital transformation and inclusive digital finance. They will join an active community of alumni of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion’s <a href="https://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/get-involved#fellow-exec-ed">executive education programs</a>.

“By developing and strengthening leadership skills that drive business growth and social impact, our partnership with the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion will help accelerate financial inclusion and economic progress around the world,” said Florencia Spangaro, Director of Programs, Citi Foundation.

“FMO is a proud partner of Accion for over a decade and we realize that creating a lasting impact starts in the board room. Strengthening the management of financial service providers and enterprises will help ensure business longevity and commitment to underserved customers,” said Gerbrich Salverda, Capacity Development Officer at FMO.
###
About the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion

The Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion (CFI) is an action-oriented think tank that engages and challenges the industry to better serve, protect, and empower clients. We develop insights, advocate on behalf of clients, and collaborate with stakeholders to achieve a comprehensive vision for financial inclusion. We are dedicated to enabling 3 billion people who are left out of – or poorly served by – the financial sector to improve their lives.
<a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/">www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/CFI_Accion">@CFI_Accion</a>
###
MEDIA CONTACT

Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion
<a href="/bio/virginia-moore">Virginia Moore</a>
<a href="mailto:vmoore@accion.org">vmoore@accion.org</a>
+1 202.393.5113

The Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion Launches Executive Education Program for Financial Service Providers to Enable Business Growth and Social Impact

Citi Foundation

Board Leadership for Impact Program

Banks

Financial Service Providers

Consumer Credit

Customer Centricity

Education Finance

Energy Finance

Fintechs

Governance

Housing Finance

Informal Credit

Insurance Companies

Microfinance

Microfinance Institutions

Neobanks

Partnerships

Risk Management

Press Release

BRAC Uganda shares strategy and sustainability insights from its transition from an MFI to a bank.

By Emily Coppel and Isabel Whisson, BRAC


[caption id="attachment_24537" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]<img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-24537" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/awright_ug_006333-e1509999126706.jpg?w=2048" alt="Woman holds carton of eggs" width="1024" height="623" /> ©BRAC/Alison Wright[/caption]

BRAC Uganda Microfinance is pursuing a shift in its regulatory status that will allow it to broaden the landscape of financial services it provides to Uganda’s rural poor.

BRAC, the largest microfinance provider in Uganda, currently serves more than 200,000 predominantly rural, female clients, through more than 150 branches across nearly every district in the country. In the nine years since the microfinance company was established, BRAC has provided microloans to poor women (a basic loan ranges from US $55 - $1,400), and small enterprise loans for male and female business owners (from US $1,400 - $10,000). Its current portfolio is around US $45 million. This year, BRAC submitted its application to transform into a bank. In Uganda, it was a Tier 4 institution, a category for unregulated credit-only NGOs, and money lenders. After the transformation, BRAC will become a regulated Credit Institution, under Tier 2, allowing it to expand its suite of services for clients – most notably, to savings accounts.

The process of transitioning to a regulated institution in Uganda is a lengthy one, and requires the organization to strategically analyze its goals and pro-poor model. Much can be learned from this process that can inform others considering a similar transformation to expand services for clients. As with any significant change, the organization is already facing new challenges that must be carefully and creatively navigated so as not to alienate its customer base.

<h3><img class="alignright wp-image-24531" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/classification-of-financial-institutions-in-uganda.png?w=820" alt="Classification of Financial Institutions in Uganda Infographic" width="360" height="900" />Pursuing Mission-Aligned Regulation
</h3>
BRAC had been considering this transformation since 2012, but waited several years to initiate the process. “We wanted to wait until we were certain that the balance sheet was big enough, and the company profitable enough to absorb the added compliance costs of being a deposit taking entity without risking mission drift,” said Shameran Abed, BRAC’s Director of Microfinance and Targeting the Ultra Poor Programs. By 2015, BRAC leadership were confident that they could begin.

The decision to pursue Tier 2 Credit Institution status, as opposed to other tiers, was also strongly driven by its social mission of promoting financial inclusion for Uganda’s poor. After some analysis, ‘Tier 1’ and ‘Tier 3’ status posed several risks that could compromise BRAC’s pro-poor mission.

The initial thought was to transition to a Tier 3 Microfinance Deposit Taking Institution, but this entailed several drawbacks. With Tier 3 institutions, despite lower regulatory costs, the regulations restriction the largest shareholder to a maximum 30 percent ownership stake. BRAC leadership wanted to avoid a situation where other shareholders might come in and steer the company in a different direction. As a Tier 2 institution, BRAC can hold a 49 percent share and ensure that the bank sticks to its mission by partnering with like-minded stakeholders.

Problems also surfaced with Tier 1 Credit Institution status, which is suited to commercial banking and invites significant added regulation. In addition to other challenges, it would mean competing with traditional formal banking institutions, instead of serving the poor. “Tier 1 regulation was really high-end,” said Emmanuel Emaasit, Chief Operating Officer of BRAC Uganda Microfinance, “we would be treading a thin-line against mission drift under commercial banking. Our clients are poor, so we thought we can still serve them best in Tier 2.”

By staying true to its existing client base under Tier 2, BRAC can focus squarely on providing services that meet their specific needs, e.g. by exploring savings products and money transfer services. Finally, Tier 2 enables BRAC to call itself a ‘bank,’ which instills trust and legitimacy that will give clients confidence to save with the institution.
<h3>Cross-Subsidizing Products for the Poor</h3>
For customers interested in starting a savings account with the new institution, the opening balance is just US $1.50. Because of its low income client base, BRAC anticipates the majority of its savings accounts will be relatively small.

As a credit-only NGO, disbursing and collecting small loans from clients only required BRAC to have loan capital on hand. But transitioning to a regulated institution that collects savings will require the bank to meet a minimum standard for its deposit base. “Small savers will not give us a large enough deposit base,” said BRAC Uganda Microfinance CEO Jimmy Adiga. “So we opened a branch [in Uganda’s capital] to attract corporate clients who would have larger savings accounts.”

According to Adiga, these corporate savings accounts will have attractive interest and the lending function of the bank will only be for BRAC’s usual low-income client base. But what if these new corporate clients want to take out loans? The bank will put a loan ceiling in place to ensure that BRAC doesn’t drift from its mission of predominantly serving poor clients.
<h3>Ushering Digital Financial Services Into Rural Areas</h3>
Walking around Kampala, it would be hard to miss the pink “Mobile Money” signs at nearly every convenience store along the roadside. Mobile money is relatively new to Uganda, but about half of the country is using it. With neighboring Kenya seeing massive success of its M-PESA platform, Adiga explains that poor clients are primed for digital financial services. “For the poor, it creates convenience and access,” he said, “but it’s not affordable if we run on the existing platform.”

With this transition, BRAC Uganda plans to begin introducing mobile money to the rural poor in the next two or three years. Its goal again aligns closely with the mission of the international BRAC organization -- to expand financial inclusion and empower the poor. A <a href="http://www.microfinancegateway.org/sites/default/files/publication_files/new_jack_and_suri_paper_1.pdf">research report in </a><a href="http://www.microfinancegateway.org/sites/default/files/publication_files/new_jack_and_suri_paper_1.pdf">Science</a> looked at the impact of mobile money over six years and found that access to M-PESA enabled 2 percent of Kenyans to move out of poverty, with results particularly pronounced for women.
<h3>Square Peg in a Round Hole</h3>
Early challenges are beginning to surface. Many Tier 2 regulations were not designed with BRAC’s client base in mind. For example, using a signature to verify client identity is standard practice for other Tier 2 banks. But for BRAC clients, many of whom are illiterate, signatures are often inconsistent and unreliable. BRAC plans to explore biometric identification instead.

Furthermore, rules required by the central bank to increase accountability among borrowers make loans prohibitively expensive for BRAC’s low-income clients. Every borrower from a regulated institution is expected to register with the Credit Reference Bureau. This incurs an additional cost to customers, which, for BRAC’s clients, would challenge its value proposition. Determined not to let the transition push clients away, BRAC is exploring the possibility of cost-sharing with investors who also value high quality, accessible, financial services for the poor.

Pursuing a change in regulatory status can seem daunting for financial service providers that serve the poor – and for whom certain regulatory environments are often not suited. BRAC hopes that it can demonstrate – to regulators and other financial service providers alike – the critical role microfinance institutions can play in addressing the broad range of financial needs of people living in poverty.

For more on BRAC’s work in Africa, see <a href="http://globaldeliveryinitiative.org/library/case-studies/financial-inclusion-and-resilience-how-bracs-microfinance-program-recovered">this case study</a> on how BRAC responded to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

Success, Growth and Regulation – BRAC Uganda’s Transition to a Bank and What It Means for Customers

Uganda

&gt; Posted by Joshua Goldstein, Principal Director for Economic Citizenship &amp; Disability Inclusion, CFI

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30827726@N05/6443373679/"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-14900" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/6443373679_40512f2f5c_z.jpg" alt="" width="580" height="435" /></a>It has always been my unexamined belief that as economies mature the so called “informal sector” will shrink and with it the microfinance market. Sometimes unexamined beliefs based on instinct or intuition turn out to be right when subject to a fact-rich inquiry. But not this time. Upon investigating I uncovered growth trends in the informal sector and in urbanization, suggesting a refocusing for microfinance.

The informal sector is <a href="http://www.oecd.org/development/povertyreduction/43280700.pdf">growing everywhere in the world</a>. This segment of the economy, though its definition varies, includes activities of the working poor that are unrecognized, unrecorded, unprotected, or unregulated by public authorities. In more developed countries, also considered part of the informal economy are employment positions that have <a href="http://www.ilo.org/dyn/infoecon/docs/441/F596332090/women%20and%20men%20stat%20picture.pdf">tenuous connections between the worker and formal structures</a> and few, if any, labor rights or benefits. Globally, estimates for the total informal economy vary between <a href="http://www.cgap.org/sites/default/files/FocusNote-Financial-Inclusion-and-Development-April-2014.pdf">50 and 60 percent</a> of the world’s population. According to Gallup’s 2012 World Survey, only about 40 percent of adults around the world, across all countries and income groups, have a fixed income for over 30 hours per week.

In India, when looking at the non-agricultural sector, <a href="http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/c-p-chandrasekhar/india-still-a-vast-informal-economy/article5282078.ece">71 percent</a> of workers in rural areas and 67 percent of workers in urban areas are operating in the informal economy. Some poor countries have informal economies that include over 80 and even 90 percent of the population. Not surprisingly, self-employed women make up the <a href="http://blogs.state.gov/stories/2012/05/17/decent-work-informal-sector-workers#sthash.3cdzCes0.dpuf">majority</a> of informal sector workers. Much of informal work is done from the home.

In wealthier nations where formal sector employment and its benefits have been more the rule than the exception, the environment is changing. In France, for example, <a href="http://home.windstream.net/bsundquist1/ie.html#B2">86 percent</a> of new hires are temporary workers. In Japan, the percentage of temporary staff is about <a href="http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=41dd48d3-7af8-4cc0-8972-92971050569c">38 percent</a>, with more than half of the female working population holding such positions.

A backdrop to this growth is the rise of urbanization. The urban population in the developing world is expected to nearly double in size between 2000 and 2025, <a href="http://home.windstream.net/bsundquist1/ie.html">from almost 2 billion to more than 3.5 billion</a>. It is projected to surpass the rural population by 2020. Conversely, the rural population in developing countries is projected to stop growing after 2020, at about 3.1 billion. About 90 percent of the world’s population growth out to 2025 is expected to come from urban areas in developing countries. Beyond these forecasts, the urban population and urbanization are expected to continue increasing.

The implications of urban informality for the microfinance industry are self-evident: the services microfinance offers will continue to be relevant and their market will grow.  MFI strategic plans should factor in an ever growing urban client base and the proportional shrinking of the rural one. If this happens, how might the industry landscape reshape? Investors in regulated institutions will surely be happy that densely populated cities mean lower operational costs and therefore higher margins than in rural areas. But if such dense client bases are available, perhaps this wealth could be leveraged to enable institutions to expand service for the harder to reach rural clients. Through the changes, it will remain essential that the industry strives to adequately serve both urban and rural client segments.

Image credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30827726@N05/6443373679/" target="_blank">uusc4all</a>
Have you read?
<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/01/09/financial-inclusion-by-2020-five-global-trends-that-will-shape-the-answer/" target="_blank">Financial Inclusion by 2020? Five Global Trends that Will Shape the Answer</a>
<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/02/15/microfinance-for-housing-in-africas-cities/" target="_blank">Microfinance for Housing in Africa's Cities</a>
<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/04/12/taxes-necessary-evil-or-blessing-in-disguise/" target="_blank">Taxes - Necessary Evil or Blessing in Disguise?</a>

Urbanization, the Informal Economy, and Microfinance

France

Europe and Central Asia

Japan

East Asia and Pacific

&gt; Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
<a href="http://microlinks.org/studying-past-looking-future-pisces-project-helping-small-enterprises-swim-upstream"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-14829" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/final_header_file_2.jpg" alt="" width="620" height="289" /></a>
The following post was <a style="color:#4e87a0" href="http://www.microlinks.org/studying-past-looking-future-pisces-project-helping-small-enterprises-swim-upstream" target="_blank">originally published on USAID's microlinks</a>.
Elisabeth Rhyne joined USAID shortly after the seminal PISCES (Program of Investment in the Small Capital Enterprise Sector) studies were completed in the 1980s. From 1994 to 1998, she was the Director of USAID’s Office of Microenterprise Development, where she developed and led USAID's Microenterprise Initiative.
The breakthrough innovations that sparked the birth of microenterprise credit in Latin America occurred in the early 1980s, and USAID was very much the driving force. Through PISCES, the Program for Investment in the Small Capital Enterprise Sector, operational from 1979 to 1985, USAID and its partner organizations began to discover the principles of success for lending to the poor, opening the way for the microfinance industry.

To understand the origins of this microfinance strategy, it helps to visualize PISCES at a time when three streams of thought came together. First was the "Spring Review" on directed agricultural credit carried out by the rural finance gurus of Ohio State University, Dale Adams and Claudio Gonzalez Vega, with J.D. von Pischke of the World Bank. Their work revealed the waste and dysfunction of subsidized agricultural credit doled out by bankrupt government credit banks. These banks were swallowing hundreds of millions of development dollars annually. The Ohio State team’s manifesto was that financial institutions must make credit decisions based on risk assessments, not politics, and charge interest rates that would allow operations to be sustainable. That review launched a gradual shift by USAID, the World Bank, and other aid agencies away from public development banks. But, if public development banks were sidelined, who would serve the poor?

At the same time research mainly by the International Labor Organization (ILO) revealed the importance of the “informal sector,” small-scale businesses operated by low-income households. These were especially important in urban areas as a source of livelihood for a vast portion, and sometimes even the majority, of the poor in developing countries. (Why this was a revelation was a mystery to me – one has only to stroll through the poor areas of a developing country to see the scale of the informal sector.) The ILO’s work excited the interest of USAID’s Office of Urban Development. Michael Farbman and his colleagues there wanted to figure out how development organizations could assist the proprietors of small and microenterprises to improve their businesses and work their way out of poverty.

Finally, with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1981, USAID adopted a pro-private sector stance. Although the businesses of the informal sector were small, interest in them received a political boost from the Reagan Administration’s new team, as did experiments in supporting vehicles other than government to deliver services.

With all those ideas fermenting among the staff and partners of the Office of Urban Development, it was only natural to design an action research project to push insights toward practice. USAID charged three organizations to go forth and search the world for entities that were doing a good job in supporting the enterprise credit needs of the poor, and to identify success factors. Accion, the overall lead, was assigned to investigate organizations working in Latin America, the Development Group for Alternative Policies in Africa, and Partnership for Productivity in Asia.

This work bore fruit in Latin America, because it was through the work of PISCES that Accion began to learn what it needed to know to build successful microfinance institutions across the region. Jeff Ashe, Accion’s lead researcher, made the following fundamental observation, which set the stage:

Once it is recognized that business owners are the best qualified to decide how to use the credit provided and that business advice will be provided informally by other business owners in the community, the process of designing programs to assist existing micro-enterprises translates largely into how to provide the right amount of credit to the small business owners quickly and economically while ensuring that the loans are paid back promptly*.

With this perspective, Ashe identified organizations in several countries that made loans quickly and economically and that had high repayment rates. In El Salvador, FEDECCREDITO, a local NGO, made very small loans to solidarity groups of five to eight people. Using that methodology, it offered credit to 2,735 businesses in 18 months, vastly more than the usual few hundred beneficiaries of most programs – and with much higher repayment rates.

While writing up the results for the PISCES report, Ashe was busy inside Accion arguing for the solidarity group approach and urging the program to test the methodology on the ground. In PISCES II, he got the chance.

To read the rest of this post, visit <a href="http://www.microlinks.org/studying-past-looking-future-pisces-project-helping-small-enterprises-swim-upstream" target="_blank">microlinks</a>.

*“The Pisces Studies: Assisting the Smallest Economic Activities of the Urban Poor”, Michael Farbman, editor, USAID, 1981, p. 29.

Note: This blog post title was inspired by Galen Hull in <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Experiments_in_Small_and_Microenterprise.html?id=OkMDHQAACAAJ" target="_blank">Experiments in Small and Microenterprise Development</a>.
Have you read?
<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/11/06/a-study-of-client-protection-practices-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean/" target="_blank">A Study of Client Protection Practices in Latin America and the Caribbean</a>
<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/07/22/clearing-the-path-to-financial-capability-in-latin-america/" target="_blank">Clearing the Path to Financial Capability in Latin America</a>
<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/06/26/democratizing-data-to-increase-transparency-access-and-knowledge-for-the-new-generation-of-latin-americans/" target="_blank">Democratizing Data to Increase Transparency, Access, and Knowledge for the New Generation of Latin Americans</a>

The PISCES Project - Helping Small Enterprises Swim Upstream

Latin America and The Caribbean

&gt; Posted by Bob Bragar, Principal, Strategies for Impact Investors

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/category/investing-in-inclusive-finance/" target="_blank" rel="attachment wp-att-9676"><img class="alignright" style="border:0" alt="" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/untitled2.jpg" width="310" height="54" /></a>The <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/programs-a-projects/investing-in-inclusive-finance" target="_blank">Investing in Inclusive Finance</a> program at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion explores the practices of investors in inclusive finance. Across areas including risk, governance, stakeholder alignment, and fund management, this blog series highlights what’s being done to help the industry better utilize private capital to develop financial institutions that incorporate social aims.

Baku, Azerbaijan doesn't look like a place that needs microfinance, at least not at first glance. Oil money is coursing through the streets. The shops include Tiffany's, Cartier, Baccarat crystal, and every expensive fashion designer that New York and Paris have to offer. New apartment buildings line the road. This post-Soviet republic is transforming very fast.

But this is not the whole story. There is still a need to expand financial inclusion, despite the government’s efforts to do this. According to MicroRate's report, “<a href="http://www.microrate.com/the-state-of-microfinance-investment-2013-survey-and-analysis-of-mivs-8th-edition" target="_blank">The State of Microfinance Investment 2013</a>”, Azerbaijan is one of the largest microfinance markets for international investors. The 45 percent annual growth in Azeri microfinance is one of the fastest in the world. The Azerbaijan Microfinance Association (AMFA) reports that Azerbaijan’s microfinance portfolio, including via banks, is approaching USD 1 billion.

One group that is doing very important work, however, seems to be excluded from the party. These are the rural credit unions that are supporting agricultural finance.

By every measure, these credit unions are doing exactly what Western social investors want. They are committed to agriculture, and helping small farmers keep their holdings. Client protection is deep in their DNA, even if they are not familiar with the Smart Campaign. Rather than clients, they have members. Their governance is a cooperative structure, designed to serve the needs of these members. Interest rates are relatively low, aimed at sustainability rather than large profits. Loan amounts are small, designed to meet the farmers’ business needs.

Last month, I was invited to meet the Azeri credit unions at the invitation of <a href="http://ia-az.net/eng/" target="_blank">Credit Implementing Agency</a>, which is an umbrella institution that provides loan capital and support. Starting early in the morning, we drove for hours away from Baku to meet the credit unions on their own turf and have them explain their situation in their own words. We met in the simple structure that serves as the headquarters of one of the larger credit unions.
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/8121030@N08/4085199202/" target="_blank"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-13422" style="border:0;margin-top:10px;margin-bottom:10px" alt="" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/sheep.jpg" width="600" /></a>On his computer screen connected to a camera, the credit union’s managing director could see the customers approaching the bank to transact business. He knew many of his customers by name and was proud that he was familiar with their business and family situations. I couldn’t help but think of Jimmy Stewart’s portrayal of the good-hearted small-town banker in Frank Capra’s 1946 classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
The Azeri rural credit unions extend enterprise loans to help members buy inputs and pre-finance crops. They understand their borrowers and work closely with them to develop lending cycles that match the business plans. Consumer lending is minimal.
Credit Implementing Agency is a pioneer in Azerbaijan. This umbrella organization for the credit unions was started with seed capital from the World Bank. It has financed 15,000 low-income borrowers via 70 credit unions operating in 51 regions of Azerbaijan. I was told that the average farms are three to five hectares, and the average loan size is US$3,000 to US$5,000.

Even so, capital is scarce. Located in remote areas that have the fewest financial services, the credit unions have great difficulty in obtaining capital, and international investors have not yet shown an interest.

Why is this? Why should these institutions, which in many ways do the kind of microfinance that international investors say that they want, find it so difficult to expand?

Much of the difficulty can be attributed to the nature of credit unions. As membership enterprises, they tend to be isolated from the general business environment. They can take deposits, effectively equity capital, only from their members. This puts a brake on growth.

There are creative ways to funnel capital to this impact-driven sector. If we are truly committed to financial inclusion, then it’s incumbent on international microfinance investors not to leave out such vital players as the Azeri credit unions.

Should investors tread carefully? Of course. Every new industry has had some painful experiences that serve as lessons for the future, and Azeri credit unions probably have as well. Transparency might be better. Organizational capacity and IT could be expanded. Many credit unions need to learn to tell their stories better. English-language ability is limited. And how can credit unions safely take on external debt?

But we look to the future rather than the past. How can we support something valuable here?

There’s a great microfinance party going on in Azerbaijan. Let’s be sure everyone who deserves to be there is invited.

Bob Bragar is the Principal of Strategies for Impact Investors. He is also a member of the <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/collaborators-a-sponsors/governance-working-group" target="_blank">Governance Working Group</a>. You can contact him <a href="http://strategiesforimpactinvestors.com/" target="_blank">here</a>.

Image credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/8121030@N08/4085199202/" target="_blank">Mike Raybourne</a>


Have you read?

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/06/05/sowing-sustainable-finance-making-rural-inclusion-a-priority/" target="_blank">Sowing Sustainable Finance: Making Rural Inclusion a Priority</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/02/10/improving-sector-transparency-a-case-study-on-the-azerbaijan-microfinance-association/" target="_blank">Improving Sector Transparency: A Case Study on the Azerbaijan Microfinance Association</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/05/24/new-smart-note-supporting-members-to-adopt-client-protection-at-azerbaijan-microfinance-association/" target="_blank">New Smart Note: Supporting Members to Adopt Client Protection at Azerbaijan Microfinance Association</a>

Microfinance in Azerbaijan: Who is Not Invited to the Party?

Azerbaijan

&gt; Posted by Bindu Ananth and Amit Shah, President of IFMR Trust and Head of Business Intelligence at IFMR Rural Finance

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Engineering-Low-Income-Households-Ananth/dp/8132109716" target="_blank" rel="attachment wp-att-11474"><img class="alignright wp-image-11474" style="border:0" alt="" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/a1f7xbmbkcl-_sl1500_.jpg" width="200" /></a>

Bindu and Amit co-edited the recently published book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Engineering-Low-Income-Households-Ananth/dp/8132109716" target="_blank">Financial Engineering for Low-Income Households</a>. An edited compilation of articles, the book focuses on using financial engineering to design financial services for low-income households. A Q&amp;A with Bindu and Amit follows. 

For someone unfamiliar with the field, how would you describe financial engineering, and to what extent do you see financial engineering being applied by retail providers serving low-income households today?

In the Foreword to the book, Dr. Nachiket Mor, a mentor to us at IFMR Trust, observes that the retail finance industry the world over has gone in the direction of standardized products and transferring the burden of decision-making away from bankers and to the consumer. This is also true of providers serving low-income households. This, we think, misses the power of finance. The motivation of this book is to systematically compile principles from finance and economics theory and apply them to the context of design and delivery of financial services for low-income households. We use the term financial engineering in this context.

Do you think that this framework addresses any misapprehensions, gaps, or problems in the way that financial products are currently designed for low-income households?

I think it is safe to say that there is negligible design today – largely because so much of the energy and focus has been on sheer distribution. Just getting a small loan delivered in a remote context is hard enough, leave alone worrying about whether the loan is structured well to suit the customer. This book lays out an approach for a new generation of providers, who are concerned about distributing well-designed products to meet client needs, not just any product.

One of the goals of your book is to provide an understanding of the risk-reward trade-offs facing low-income households. In your experience, what is the most widespread risk barrier, perceived or actual, preventing greater financial services adoption in India?

I think one of the big challenges that we worry a lot about is that so much of the portfolio of low-income households is dominated by physical assets (land, house, and livestock). These are typically low return, high risk, and highly correlated with their human capital. The opportunities to do better than that are therefore infinite.

How can we shift this particular risk-reward trade-off in favor of financial services? What area of financial services design and delivery presents the biggest opportunity for improvement?

The biggest opportunity is in going away from standardized products delivered “over the counter” to customized delivery. It is indeed possible to do this at scale through effective human and software interactions. Financial engineering is essential to this customization. In theory, each person can have a uniquely designed portfolio of financial services that reflect her growth and risk management needs. Financial engineering provides us the algorithms/rules for this customization.

Does financial capability play into financial engineering product design or marketing? Some studies have shown that even extremely well-designed products can have very low adoption among low-income households if they don’t understand the features of the products or the intended benefits. 

Agreed, this is where the role of the provider is so crucial. In Chapter 1, we argue that instead of passing the buck to the client in the name of literacy and capability, there must be a greater onus on the provider to assess and provide suitable financial services. In fact, we wrote the book keeping in mind the staff of financial institutions like cooperative banks, microfinance institutions, rural banks. If staff in these institutions understand these ideas better, they can impact adoption rates among clients.

As you are at the helm of <a href="http://ruralchannels.ifmr.co.in/kgfs-model/about-kgfs" target="_blank">KGFS</a>, a growing rural financial services company, you have had the chance to apply financial engineering first-hand. Can you talk more about what that has been like and any particularly successful products? 

It has been amazing to execute this first-hand at KGFS jointly with my talented colleagues over the last five years. We did two things in particular that helped. One, we created a specialist team that is very highly trained in product design, drawing on both financial engineering as well as client understanding. Second, we developed an operating model where the front-line salesperson is incentivized to acquire an in-depth understanding of the customer profile and provide the financial services that are suitable to them. The KGFS branch is not rewarded on the basis of product sale in-aggregate, but on suitable sale. This reinforces the concept on a daily basis. One of our biggest successes has been in insurance. Linking insurance sale to human capital values and premium linked to age of the customer has enabled us to have much better success than a standardized insurance sale approach.

What up-and-coming financial services innovations are you most excited about at KGFS or market-wide?

We are making a big shift at KGFS from product-based credit under-writing to household-based credit under-writing. Instead of relying on collateral like gold or group guarantees to decide credit eligibility, a new process that we are testing will underwrite the household on first principles and then take collateral as a deterrent against strategic default. This is an important innovation and will allow us to make sure that clients can exploit growth opportunities much better without getting stymied by product-specific criteria. For example, if a client wants a loan for higher education of his daughter and has enough cash-flows to support the same, we can provide the same with recourse to collateral of some type (house, shop, land) without having to call it or structure it as an “education loan.”

<a href="http://www.ruralfinance.ifmr.co.in/#!portfolio/cjg9" target="_blank" rel="attachment wp-att-11479"><img class="alignleft wp-image-11479" style="border:0" alt="" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/bindu-1.jpg" width="80" /></a>Bindu Ananth has been the President of IFMR Trust since January 2008. Prior to this, she worked in ICICI Bank’s microfinance team between 2001 and 2005 and was Head of the new product development team within the Rural Banking Group in 2007. Bindu Ananth has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Madras University and Masters Degrees from the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA) and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is a Fellow of the Global Economic Society and a Member of the Technical Committee of CGAP. She is also a member of the FICCI Taskforce on Financial Inclusion.

<a href="http://www.ruralfinance.ifmr.co.in/#!portfolio/cjg9" target="_blank"><img class="alignleft wp-image-11481" style="border:0" alt="" src="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/amit-1.jpg" width="80" height="94" /></a>

Amit Shah has been with IFMR Rural Finance for 4 years to develop the theory and framework that enables the creation of an optimal financial plan. Previously he worked with HDFC Bank after getting his MBA at the Institute of Rural Management Anand.

Have you read?

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/08/17/an-excellent-resource-on-regulating-client-protection-ifmr-trusts-blog-series/" target="_blank">An Excellent Resource on Client Protection: IFMR Trust's Blog Series</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/12/28/behavioral-insights-to-advance-financial-inclusion/" target="_blank">Behavioral Insights to Advance Financial Inclusion</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/08/24/indian-microfinance-leaders-talk-about-poverty/" target="_blank">Indian Microfinance Leaders Talk About Poverty</a>

Financial Engineering for Low-Income Households

Financial Capability

Mayada El-Zoghbi

Managing Director

Eda Dokle

Camilla Nestor

Mark Pickens

Joanna Ledgerwood

David Ferrand

Brigitta Nyawira

Bruce MacDonald

Saran Sidime

Andrew Fixler

Eric Noggle

Jeffrey Riecke

Mexico

Kenya

Philippines

Zambia

China

Colombia

Dominican Republic

Ghana

Guatemala

India

Nigeria

Paraguay

Peru

Rwanda

Tanzania

United States

Chile

Financial Technology

Inclusive insurance

Insurtech

Agent Banking

Mobile Banking

P2P Lending

Pensions and Retirement Saving

Underwriting

Aging and Older Adults

Consumer Protection

Financial Inclusion Strategy

Persons With Disabilities

Remittances

Saving

Social Performance

Transparency

Youth

Payments

Trends

This post is adapted from the recently-released publication “<a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/storage/Inclusive_Insurance_Final_2018.01.06.pdf">Inclusive Insurance: Closing the Protection Gap for Emerging Customers</a>,” a joint-report from the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion and the Institute of International Finance, in partnership with MetLife Foundation.

New technologies are dramatically changing the landscape for insurance around the world and enabling insurers to reach new mass market segments. New data sources and analytical tools are changing risk models by enabling new ways to create, capture, and analyze valuable information that can help insurers better calculate and manage the risk associated with customers. Machine learning applied to satellite imagery is changing agricultural and disaster insurance, allowing for more sophisticated claims management, even facilitating pre-loss payments that can help minimize the cost of a disaster before it is full-blown. The expansion of identity solutions and onboarding options is lowering operations costs and enhancing convenience. These innovations are helping the global insurance industry transform from a passive risk-transmission industry into an active risk mitigation and advisory partner for individuals, businesses, and governments.

The use of mobile phones to deliver insurance is no longer a novelty, but there is tremendous scope for growth. Mobile phone penetration in emerging markets is now 80 percent, making mobile devices excellent distribution channels. Mobile phones are convenient for enrollment, transmitting premiums and paying claims. Mobile phones have also been helpful for customer service, policy management, consumer education, and other vital functions.

While mobile insurance products have already broken important new ground, there is a much broader array of more recent innovations paving the way for growth. The joint CFI-IIF report found providers using technology to solve both front-end and back-end challenges. Here are some of the ways providers are addressing customer and business needs through technology.
<h3>Instant Enrollment</h3>
In many countries, advances in identification systems have made it possible to enroll customers instantly. Garrance Wattez-Richard, Head of Emerging Markets at AXA, notes, “National ID is changing everything in China and in India.” In Colombia, Margarita Henao Cabrera reports that customers can enroll in DaviPlata’s insurance in seconds by entering their national IDs into their mobile phones. Richard Leftley, CEO of MicroEnsure, notes that even basic questions such as the customer’s name, age, and other demographics can create a barrier to enrollment, so enrolling customers based only on phone numbers eliminates those barriers. “We don’t know anything about them until they make a claim, not even their name or age,” says Leftley. Depending on the market, automated enrollment mechanisms include internet-based products in China and point-of-sale devices among retailers in Latin America.
<h3>Technology-Enabled Claims Verification and Payouts</h3>
<a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/daviplata.png"><img class="wp-image-24911 alignright" style="border: 0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/daviplata.png" alt="" width="465" height="507" /></a>

Since paying claims fast builds trust and adds customer value, Allianz is experimenting with payments that do not require customers to submit a claim—for instance, if the distribution partner reports that a customer has been in an accident. Parametric or index insurance using data from weather satellites enables automatic payments for farmers. Claims payouts and management are even being enhanced by drones. Drones allow access to isolated and dangerous areas after disasters to collect aerial data and assess loss through cutting-edge imagery analytics. Munich Re has been experimenting with the technology and has partnered with U.S.-based drone company PrecisionHawk. The two companies worked together in the aftermath of the April 2016 earthquake in Ecuador.
<h3>Back-Office Systems</h3>
Modernizing back-office IT systems helps bring down administrative costs, making low-premium products cheaper to manage. When AXA acquired MicroEnsure, its first investment was to improve legacy IT infrastructure. LeapFrog Investments also prioritizes IT with its microinsurance investments. To further reduce transaction costs, some experiments use blockchain technology, such as Consuelo, offered by the Mexican-based mobile platform Saldo.mx, in this case to facilitate microinsurance for Mexican migrant workers in the United States. By providing a universal and tamper-proof record of transactions, blockchain technology could reduce human error, fraud, data duplication, processing delays, and opaqueness—ultimately increasing efficiency and lowering operational and administrative costs for the insurance industry. (Though at a very high energy cost.)
<h3>Using New Data to Reappraise Risks</h3>
Historically, there has not been enough data to feed actuarial analysis that can inform a relevant product at a fair and attractive price for newer and lower income market segments. However, data has now become available on people who have a national ID or mobile phone number. Data analytics can then be effective at identifying prospective customers and their behavior patterns. Salmaan Jaffery of DIFC Authority looks forward to using artificial intelligence and machine learning in product development and risk assessment. With new data tools, the sector will look at risk differently. As Jaffery explains, “It may become apparent, through the analysis of behavioral and social data, that lower-income people may not be any greater risk than those with higher income profiles.”

For more on the uses of technology in inclusive insurance, including how it’s enabling integrated services for health insurance, read “<a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/storage/Inclusive_Insurance_Final_2018.01.06.pdf">Inclusive Insurance: Closing the Protection Gap for Emerging Customers</a>.”

Image credit: Accion

Have you read?

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2018/01/08/inclusive-insurance-closing-the-protection-gap-for-emerging-customers/">Inclusive Insurance: Closing the Protection Gap for Emerging Customers</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2017/04/13/making-microinsurance-work-in-bangladesh-three-takeaways/">Making Microinsurance Work in Bangladesh: Three Takeaways</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2014/10/06/bundling-mhealth-info-and-microinsurance-to-improve-health-outcomes-in-kenya/">Bundling mHealth Info and Microinsurance to Improve Health Outcomes in Kenya</a>

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

How Technology Is Propelling Inclusive Insurance

Most of Mexico’s people lack access to a formal bank account. Accion has worked in Mexico for decades to create a thriving and competitive financial sector that embraces innovation and protects its clients.

<img class="aligncenter wp-image-24227" style="border: 0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/fi-week_cropped.png" alt="" width="616" height="273" />

<a href="http://www.financialinclusionweek.org/">Financial Inclusion Week 2017</a> is just over two weeks away. From October 30 – November 3, over 50 organizations will host online and in-person events across the globe, exploring the theme New Products, New Partnerships, New Potential.

We are excited to announce <a href="https://group.axa.com/">the AXA Group</a> is a <a href="http://financialinclusionweek.org/axa-sponsorship/">track partner</a> for the Week. The AXA Group, a world leader in financial protection, supports its individual and corporate customers at every stage of their lives, providing them with the products and services that meet their insurance, personal protection, savings and wealth management needs.

A full calendar of Financial Inclusion Week events will be launched on October 17th, but here is a quick preview:
<ul>
 	<li>AXA will host a fireside chat between <a href="https://group.axa.com/en/about-us/profile/garance-wattez-richard">Garance Wattez-Richard</a>, Head of AXA Emerging Customers and <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/about/leadership/121-elisabeth-rhyne">Elisabeth Rhyne</a>, Managing Director of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion. The discussion will focus on how innovative products and partnerships are expanding access to insurance around the world.</li>
 	<li><a href="https://www.themix.org/">MIX</a> and <a href="https://oneacrefund.org/">One Acre Fund</a> will host a webinar to discuss how their recently-announced <a href="https://www.themix.org/news/mymix/supporting-smallholder-finance">smallholder finance product directory</a> will help close the information gap in smallholder agricultural finance. This will be an opportunity to learn how better information-sharing can catalyze growth and product development across the smallholder finance sector.</li>
 	<li><a href="https://www.habitat.org/">Habitat for Humanity</a>, <a href="https://www.metlife.com/about/corporate-responsibility/metlife-foundation/index.html">MetLife Foundation</a>, and <a href="https://www.omidyar.com/">Omidyar Network</a> will host a session in Washington, D.C. titled Promoting Access to Finance for Affordable Housing. During the session, microfinance CEOs who, with the help of Habitat for Humanity’s <a href="https://www.habitat.org/impact/our-work/terwilliger-center-innovation-in-shelter/microbuild">MicroBuild Fund</a>, have led the way in developing housing finance products will share their stories.</li>
</ul>
It’s not too late for you or your organization to get involved. If you haven’t made plans for the Week yet, here are a few suggestions:

Host a conversation: You can organize a small internal or external conversation to discuss the theme New Products, New Partnerships, New Potential. The conversation will be promoted on the Financial Inclusion Week website as well as on social media. Following the event, the convening will get a dedicated page on the Financial Inclusion Week website to highlight key messages, photos, and other materials from the event.

We welcome you to pick the event format that works best for you. That may be a larger event or a smaller conversation, occurring in-person, by conference call, or via webinar. The most important thing is that your event fulfills our common purpose of having conversations that are significant for advancing financial inclusion. We’ve developed <a href="http://financialinclusionweek.org/toolkit2017/">a full set of resources for planning and promoting your event</a>.

Integrate Financial Inclusion Week into planned events: If you already have an event planned during the week of October 30th, and it aligns with the Week’s theme, we would love to promote your event as part of Financial Inclusion Week and share your work with the FI Week community.

Join a webinar or watch live-streaming events: Stay tuned for a full calendar of events to be launched next week. There, you will find webinars and online events covering a wide range of topics. Register and fill out your calendar for Financial Inclusion Week.

Write a blog post or join the conversation on social media:  We encourage you to write a blog post focused on how new products and new partnerships are unlocking great potential for reaching and better serving underserved customer segments. You can post these on your own sites and/or reach out to us on potentially posting these on the CFI Blog. We also welcome you to join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook, with the hashtag #FinclusionWeek.

Explore the <a href="http://www.financialinclusionweek.org/">Financial inclusion Week website</a> for more information or reach out to Allyse McGrath at <a href="mailto:amcgrath@accion.org">amcgrath@accion.org</a> with any questions.

Have you read?

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2016/11/17/financial-inclusion-week-roundup-e-magazine-keeping-clients-first-in-a-digital-world/">Financial Inclusion Week Roundup E-Magazine: Keeping Clients First in a Digital World</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2017/03/03/when-the-data-is-not-enough/">When the Data Is Not Enough</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2014/03/31/asset-based-financing-and-flexible-repayment-schedules-to-better-serve-africas-smallholder-farmers/">Asset-Based Financing and Flexible Repayment Schedules to Better Serve Africa's Smallholder Farmers</a>

Have You Marked Your Calendars for Financial Inclusion Week 2017?

The majority of Kenyans have mobile money accounts; their activity demonstrates digital financial services’ potential. Accion helps Kenyan innovators harness emerging technologies to create new financial services.

&gt; Posted by Brigitta Nyawira, Program Manager, Grameen Foundation

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EjbTJF99aw"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-24199" style="border:0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/grameen-foundation-screenshot.png" alt="" width="614" height="314" /></a>Alice is a smallholder farmer in Machakos, a semi-arid town east of Nairobi, where subsistence farming is prevalent. Most farmers in Machakos grow maize and other drought-resistant crops for domestic consumption and sell whatever little surplus they have at the gates of their farms and in local markets. Until recently, Alice struggled to make a decent living from her small plot of land and small grocery. She did not have the inputs required to increase her productivity, and her farming skills were basic at best, learned through season after season of trial and error. Farming was frustrating because it barely gave her enough money to feed her three children, take them to school, and pay hospital bills. But without capital and the requisite skills to expand her income sources, it was the only thing she could do.

Alice’s story is not uncommon. Smallholder farmers across Africa still face obstacles accessing suitable, affordable financial services. This is especially acute for women.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 80 percent of the arable land in Sub-Saharan Africa is managed by smallholder farmers, with women accounting for 50 percent of the agricultural labor force. In Kenya, where 75 percent of the population makes a living from agriculture (directly and indirectly) and the sector accounts for 24 percent of GDP, only 4 percent of the country’s total credit is channeled to agriculture. A fraction of that goes to women smallholder farmers.

Where credit is available, traditional lenders, who typically view smallholder farmers as being high risk, require a series of hard-to-meet pre-requisites in order to access credit. Smallholder farmers are commonly asked to produce a title deed to their land, or demonstrate financial stability that can only be verified through bank statements. Most will not meet these minimum requirements. This keeps smallholder famers in Kenya locked in a vicious cycle of poor inputs, low productivity and low income. It is particularly hard for women, who traditionally have not been allowed to own property, require their husbands’ consent to open a bank account, and have primarily worked at home or on the farm, making little or no money at all. Any money they would make would either be given to the husband, or channeled back to the home to cater for the needs of the household. Without collateral, savings or financial records, it has been nearly impossible for women in Kenya to access formal financial services.

To address these challenges and provide access to a suitable, affordable and accessible agricultural loan, Grameen Foundation and Musoni Kenya, a local microfinance institution that operates mainly in rural Kenya, collaborated to design Kilimo Booster. The loan product is tailored to the needs of smallholder farmers.

Unlike other loans, its flexible repayment terms correspond to farmers’ harvest cycles and cash flows. Equally important, funds are disbursed directly into farmers’ mobile money accounts no more than 72 hours after a loan is approved. Additional features also make Kilimo Booster especially convenient to women.
<h4>Groups Are Still Important</h4>
The Kilimo Booster loan utilizes the group methodology in which members co-guarantee each other for loans. This type of social collateral typically works well for women as they are already accustomed to the workings of informal savings and credit groups, and because it eliminates the need to prove financial stability through bank statements and traditional collateral.
<h4>Technology Extends Reach</h4>
Musoni Kenya’s operations are powered exclusively by mobile technology. Applications for Kilimo Booster are made via a digital field app and loan disbursements and repayments are made via mobile money technology. This is typically a welcomed feature among the women, who do not have to leave tending of the home and farm to travel to a Musoni branch in town for their loans to be processed. According to Alice, “Using the mobile phone is easy for us and it saves time. No one knows what you are doing, or if you have money, so it is also safe for us.”

Using digital technology, the loan application process has been simplified enough to accommodate everyone, regardless of their education levels. The loan officer visits the farmers in their homes, collects all the necessary information digitally, and once the loan is processed, the women can cash out at a mobile money agent, typically found within a 5 kilometer radius. Kenya’s mobile phone penetration, which stands at 90 percent (more than 75 percent of them are registered mobile money users), has provided an enabling environment for the uptake of digitally-enabled products such as Kilimo Booster.
<h4>Targeted Outreach</h4>
Since its roll-out in 2013, more than 17,000 Kilimo Booster loans have been disbursed, with women receiving 55 percent of the loans. To continually reach more women, Kilimo’s marketing activities are focused in rural areas, specifically in rural marketplaces, where the population of women is higher. In addition to financing, Grameen Foundation and Musoni offer farmers training on an ongoing basis, thus building their skill set and enabling them to take on and profitably utilize higher loan amounts.

Alice’s experience demonstrates how the right product can overcome the barriers to financing smallholder farmers. She has graduated from her first loan of US$200 to a loan of US$2,000, which she has used to expand her farming activities. She now grows vegetables and green grams, in addition to maize, and has also expanded into poultry, dairy goats, rabbits and guinea fowl. This has helped to smooth her income and create a stable agribusiness.

As she says in the video, “If I compare myself to people who are not with Musoni, they cannot do business the same way I do.”

Have you read?

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2017/07/19/how-women-help-women-gain-control-of-their-financial-lives/">How Women Help Women Gain Control of Their Financial Lives</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2017/03/23/will-the-crowd-support-more-women-agents/">Will the Crowd Support More Women Agents?</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2017/06/23/helping-women-control-their-financial-lives-through-digital-financial-services/">Helping Women Control Their Financial Lives through Digital Financial Services</a>

How Mobile Money Is Closing the Agricultural Finance Gap for Women in Kenya

&gt; Posted by Bruce MacDonald, Vice President, Communications and Operations, CFI

The following post was <a href="http://nextbillion.net/letter-from-mindanao-part-2-rural-banking-and-the-promise-of-cacao/">originally published</a> on NextBillion.

<img class="aligncenter wp-image-21374" style="border:0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/first-valley-488.jpg" width="615" height="426" />In <a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2016/05/18/letter-from-mindanao-part-1-the-impact-of-asean-integration-on-banking-in-the-philippines/" target="_blank">part one of this post</a>, Bruce discussed the potential impact of ASEAN Integration on banks in the Philippines, informed by his recent visit to the country. In part two below, he continues exploring the challenges and opportunities facing one of these institutions, 1st Valley Bank in Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao. 

Though national bank liberalization has led commercial Philippine banks to acquire more rural and thrift banks, potentially increasing competition for 1st Valley, it has also provided the bank with a unique advantage. A 2013 amendment to the Rural Banking Act allowed foreign investment in Philippine banks which, in turn, permitted a new company called Bridge, led by American Paul Kocourek and Englishman Gus Poston, to invest in 1st Valley. Kocourek and Poston, both with deep regional banking experience, founded Bridge in order to help build a strong network of provincial Philippine banks committed to social impact. Identifying rural finance as the “missing component of inclusive banking,” their aim is to provide critical capital for growth, but also assistance in product design, risk management and more. 


Bridge came to market in March of 2013 with $24 million in funding, provided by microfinance investment vehicles such as Bamboo Finance and national development banks such as the German DEG and Dutch FMO. (Full disclosure: Accion is also an investor and operating partner in Bridge.) 1st Valley was Bridge’s first investment, and remains its crown jewel. “The growth opportunities in [1stValley’s] target markets are huge,” says Poston. “There are 1.3 million farms in the areas where 1st Valley operates, and the bank is only lending to 7,000 at the moment. To put it into perspective, Mindanao is about the size of Cambodia. There’s approximately $5 billion of microfinance lending in Cambodia. ‘Inclusive banking’ in Mindanao is smaller than a billion dollars.”

The Bridge investment has added substantial heft to the bank’s foundation and prospects, although no one underestimates the magnitude of the task ahead. While 1st Valley President and CEO Nicolas “Sonny” Lim lists bank liberalization and the threat of ASEAN integration among his concerns, Poston throws in a few more challenges. “Typhoons, land holding questions, security issues … we face specific barriers to lending in the Philippines,” he says. “1st Valley’s challenge is to continually improve its product offering, service quality and risk-management methodology so that it can reach more farmers and microfinance clients.”

Magic Beans

Bridge’s imprint can be seen and felt particularly in product development, helping to create tools such as new loans for poultry farmers and micro-insurance. But perhaps the most important new product is 1st Valley’s cacao loan.

Eighty to 90 percent of the world’s cacao (the raw ingredient in chocolate, cocoa butter and many other popular products) is produced by small, family-run farms – farms that must be no more than 15 to 20 degrees in latitude from the equator. Cacao, says Lim, can be grown in only 36 countries in the world – but it thrives in the soil and climate of the islands’ palm-shaded small holdings, and is productive within 18 to 24 months. That makes the Philippines ideally placed to help address a global cacao shortage that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/15/the-worlds-biggest-chocolate-maker-says-were-running-out-of-chocolate/" target="_blank">some say will reach a million metric tons by 2020</a>. Since 1670 cacao has been a cash crop in the Philippines. By the 1980s, national production had reached 40,000 metric tons. By 2013, however, land reform and diseases had conspired to whittle that down to some 8,000 tons.

In response, the Department of Agriculture flagged cacao as a High Value Crop – a banner program created to help address food security, poverty alleviation and sustainable growth. Through the Philippine Cacao Challenge, the country committed to producing 100,000 metric tons by 2020, and has included cacao as part of its National Greening Program, an initiative to reforest the country. Mindanao, already delivering 90 percent of the country’s crop, was identified as ground zero.

A 1st Valley cacao loan provides borrowers up to 75,000 pesos ($1,600) over seven years. The bulk of the loan is delivered up-front, with two years’ grace given as the crop becomes established, initial installments reduced, and full installments required only during the last four years, as the plants become fully productive. To help ensure success, the bank partnered with Philippine agribusiness company Kennemer Foods International, which created a complete agricultural value chain for the smallholder farmer. This included seedlings, fertilizer, pest control, agronomy assistance and training – training not only for the growers, but also for bank staff. Farmers who follow their protocols, says Kennemer, will see their yields quadruple.

The support is typical – and timely. Mindanao is eight months into a widespread drought, the result of a powerful El Niño that has shaped Philippines weather for a year. Despite lower growth rates as a result, however, Poston reports that clients’ first cacao plantings are already producing pods.

He and Lim are forthright about the work ahead for 1st Valley:  improved risk management, expansion into electronic channels, growth across all loan products and term deposit accounts. Expectations for microfinance and SME lending, in particular, are high – 7 million pesos ($150,000) per month for the microfinance portfolio, for example, or 80 percent growth year on year. And addressing delinquency, with the total outstanding balance of loans past due for more than 30 days currently at nearly 10 percent, is paramount.

There’s work for Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), too. “The central bank still has a lot of problems to solve, especially in the rural banking industry,” Lim says. While the number of rural banks has declined by a third in recent years, to around 650, he estimates that only 200 are profitable and healthy.

As for ASEAN integration, Poston evinces little concern. “We have to be realistic about the difference between rural banking and commercial banking,” he says. “1st Valley is targeting hard-to-reach rural clients and providing them with microfinance, SME and agricultural loans, which require totally different skill sets from other forms of banking. I don’t think there will be a major foreign competitor operating in rural Mindanao. Even the local banks are reluctant to expand in these areas.”

Road Under Construction

[caption id="attachment_21376" align="alignright" width="330"]<img class="wp-image-21376" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/first-valley-626.jpg" width="330" height="220" /> Rice farmer and 13-year client of 1st Valley, Luz Hernando, Lala, Mindanao.[/caption]

To get a true feel for 1st Valley, one must leave Cagayan de Oro and get out to the country. For two days we made our way west along Mindanao’s northern coast road, stopping to visit branches and clients en route. We met Discy Santiago, a first-grade teacher at Iligan City Central School, who took out a salary loan to cover her sister’s medical expenses. In Lala, we met rice farmers such as Luz Hernando (pictured left), whose supervised credit helps ensure that her 2.5-hectare tenant farm is as productive as possible. The loan addresses every phase of the production cycle, from fertilizer and seed through to a guaranteed buyer (1stValley itself, if for any reason the farmer can’t sell their crops on the market – and at market price). “It’s like a family here,” Mimi Enad, the bank’s head of risk, told us.

The coast road itself is a work in progress. Pedestrians, motorbikes and cars wrangle and compete for space. Blind corners, high speeds, and games of “chicken” favor the nimble and strong of nerve. Cavernous potholes attest to the road’s importance; endless repaving projects emphasize the challenge. And every once in a while, for a brief second, comes a glimpse through the palms of the electric-blue Bohol Sea, like a travel poster advertising a reward for a job well done. Somewhere in there is a metaphor for 1st Valley.

The Philippines cast a long shadow in financial inclusion. To its credit go the earliest mobile money solutions, SmartMoney and GCash. The country perennially scores at the top of The Economist’s “Global Microscope” report, an annual assessment of enabling environments for financial inclusion. The BSP, among the most far-sighted, client-protection-friendly and highly regarded of central banks, keeps a sure hand on the levers of finance. It has always been a country to watch. And as Kocourek and Poston intended from the start, perhaps the Philippines is just the right place to address rural finance, that missing component of inclusive banking.

Image credits: Bruce MacDonald

Have you read?

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2016/05/18/letter-from-mindanao-part-1-the-impact-of-asean-integration-on-banking-in-the-philippines/">Letter from Mindanao, Part 1: The Impact of ASEAN Integration on Banking in the Philippines</a>

<a href="https://cfi-blog.org/2014/12/12/asias-top-country-on-financial-inclusion-policy-the-philippines-strengthens-its-microfinance-market/">Asia’s Top Country on Financial Inclusion Policy, the Philippines, Strengthens Its Microfinance Market</a>

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Letter from Mindanao, Part 2: Rural Banking and the Promise of Cacao

&gt; Posted by Bruce MacDonald, Vice President, Communications and Operations, CFI

The following post was <a href="http://nextbillion.net/letter-from-mindanao-part-1-the-impact-of-asean-integration-on-banking-in-the-philippines/">originally published</a> on NextBillion.

<img class="aligncenter wp-image-21361" style="border:0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/unspecified.jpg" width="615" height="410" />As 2016 New Year’s resolutions went, few matched the enthusiasm, ambition and fragility of the commitment made by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On Jan. 1, its 10-member countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – inaugurated the ASEAN Economic Community, a common market whose goal is to forge a prominent regional bloc to rival China and Japan, and bring economic well-being to its 625 million citizens.

Some 13 years in the making, the Community promises an increasingly free flow of services, investment, skilled labor and capital to a market that is now larger in terms of population than either North America or the European Union. Such a single market, its creators envision, will increase intra-ASEAN trade and justify greater spending on infrastructure. Currently, the six leading nations in the group (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, a.k.a., ASEAN-6) allocate an average of 26 percent of their GDP to investment, which any recent visitor to Manila or Jakarta might argue is nowhere nearly enough.

Where one stands on ASEAN integration depends, of course, on where one sits. On a recent visit to the Philippines, we posed the question to various people, including government and central bank officials, and bankers whose businesses will be impacted by the Community.

'Sweet Spot'

As 2016 neared, the Philippines government expressed confidence that the nation was ready for integration. The country’s 6.3 percent growth rate, the highest five-year average in the last four decades, puts the nation in a “sweet spot,” said Department of Trade &amp; Industry Secretary Gregory Domingo. Citing projections from HSBC and Goldman Sachs, Domingo predicted the Philippines would be the fifth-largest economy in Asia by mid-century, and the 14th largest in the world. He added, however, that prioritizing micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the regional trade agenda was critical; Philippine MSMEs comprise 98 percent of all registered GDP.

The Philippines’ central bank, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), was less sanguine. Under the ASEAN Banking Integration Framework, qualified ASEAN banks will be allowed to establish operations throughout the Community. Greater competition is a given. Regional integration would, for example, drop BDO Unibank, the Philippines’ largest bank as measured by assets, to the 19th spot in ASEAN. To help prepare banks to compete in a regional system, the BSP is adopting higher capital requirements, enhancing credit-risk management rules and raising governance standards, among other actions.

“It is imperative that you define and carve out your comparative advantage in our local market,” advised BSP Governor Amando Tetangco in a speech to Philippine bankers just before the Jan. 1 deadline. In case the message wasn’t clear, he added, “If you have not done so, you will need to make those tough decisions now to give yourselves time to execute your strategic goals.”

The ASEAN Way

Time, fortunately, appears to be on bankers’ side. Integration will be delayed, if not confounded, by an approach among ASEAN members that favors consensus-based decision-making and a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of others – the “ASEAN way,” as it has come to be known. An absence of penalties for noncompliance and the lack of a powerful central bureaucracy add to the challenge.

Unlike the EU, ASEAN has no plans for a common currency, and cross-border travel is still limited. Trade liberalization is the only aspect of the Community’s vision that shows any significant progress. Nearly all of the items the top six countries have agreed to put on the <a href="http://www.asean.org/asean-economic-community/asean-free-trade-area-afta-council/">“inclusion list”</a> are free of tariffs. Nevertheless, countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines have held back many important agricultural and food-related products from the inclusion list, citing a food security rationale. Development gaps and infrastructure differences between and among ASEAN-6 and the less developed ASEAN-4 nations present have added obstacles. ASEAN financial integration, the Financial Times pronounced recently, is “embryonic.”

<img class="alignright wp-image-21362" style="border:0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/dsc_2261.jpg" width="330" height="220" />Nicolas “Sonny” Lim (pictured right) did not exactly exude enthusiasm over the prospect of integration when we asked, but neither did he sound particularly concerned. It is, he says, just one factor he considers in his strategic planning. Lim is president and CEO of 1st Valley Bank in Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao. Rural and family-owned, medium-sized but growing, profitable but not without pressures, 1st Valley works on the front line of bringing ordinary citizens into the global economy. Founded in 1956 by Sonny’s father, Rosario, as the Rural Bank of Kapatagan Valley, it was created to serve the rice and corn farmers of the north-central provinces of Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest and southernmost island.

A rice farmer himself, the elder Lim understood his clients’ needs. The bank grew – not stupendously, but steadily – and eventually merged with the Rural Bank of Sinacaban in 2005 to become 1st Valley. With 60 to 70 percent of the Philippines’ rural population lacking a bank account, says Lim, and only a mere 6 percent of business growth in small, provincial businesses funded by bank lending, 1st Valley’s mission and market is to reach these businesses and households with support and economic prosperity. Today, 37 branches serve more than 70,000 clients, making it one of the Philippines’ largest rural banks.

Fully 61 percent of 1st Valley clients use loans for agriculture, typically rice and corn, and now, increasingly, cacao. Two loan types are offered: those secured by land or salary stream, and those that are unsupervised (uncollateralized). Salary loans of up to 525,000 pesos ($11,200), made mainly to government employees and teachers, account for 2.4 billion pesos ($51 million), or almost half of 1st Valley’s portfolio. Microfinance loans of up to 300,000 pesos ($6,400) comprise a small share of the bank’s portfolio, but serve as an important test bed for all its credit products. Small and medium enterprise (SME) lending, from 300,000 to 5 million pesos ($6,400 to $106,000), accounts for 10 percent of the portfolio and is growing at 30 to 40 percent per year, with plans to ramp it up even faster.

National bank liberalization has already led commercial Philippine banks to acquire more rural and thrift banks, potentially increasing competition for 1st Valley. The big banks see money, Lim says, particularly in salary loans. Christian-Muslim antagonism and Communist insurgency – the latest attack by the New People’s Army blared from Cagayan de Oro headlines the day we arrived – add spice to his planning challenges. For now, he explains, 1st Valley will focus on what it does best: agricultural and SME lending, and microfinance.

Image credits: Bruce MacDonald

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Letter from Mindanao, Part 1: The Impact of ASEAN Integration on Banking in the Philippines

&gt; Posted by Saran Sidime, Operations Assistant, the Smart Campaign

<img class="alignright wp-image-21236" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/thumb_b16dd4e1ca264d1f808145b85aed7c8c.jpg" width="315" height="210" />Despite – or because of – economic growth, booming exports, and increased foreign investments in many African countries, income inequality on the continent, by many accounts, is increasing. As a region, sub-Saharan Africa has a <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/africa-in-focus/posts/2015/09/22-inequality-africa-sustainable-development-goals-bhorat">higher level of inequality</a> than the rest of the developing world. Globally, <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/publication/poverty-rising-africa-poverty-report">seven of the top 10 countries</a> in terms of inequality are in Africa.

Contributing to the discrepancy is the lack of formal financial services within the region, according to <a href="http://app-cdn.acwupload.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/APP_AR2014_EXTRACT2016_PRINT.pdf">Shaking up Finance and Banking in Africa</a>, a policy brief produced by the Africa Progress Panel, which draws its analysis from the <a href="http://www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Project-and-Operations/Africa_Progress_Report_2014.PDF">2014 Africa Progress Report</a>. Only one in five Africans have any form of account at a formal financial institution. Like most parts of the world, the poor, rural dwellers, and women are particularly excluded. The strategic deployment of sustainable and inclusive finance is a vital ingredient to ensuring that Africa’s long-term growth encompasses all individuals equitably.

Between 1990 and 2012, the proportion of Africans who were poor fell from <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/publication/poverty-rising-africa-poverty-report">56 percent to 43 percent</a>, according to the World Bank. However, when you account for population growth, the total number of individuals living in poverty increased. The most optimistic scenario, calculated by the World Bank, indicates that across this 22 year window, the number of Africans living in poverty increased from 280 million to 330 million. On the other side of the spectrum, Africa is now home to over <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/datablog/2015/jul/31/africa-wealth-report-2015-rich-get-richer-poverty-grows-and-inequality-deepens-new-world-wealth">160,000 people</a> whose personal fortunes exceed USD 1 million, which represents a doubling in the number of individuals of such wealth since the turn of the century.

Haroon Bhorat, Senior Fellow at Brookings’ Africa Growth Initiative described the problem, <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/africa-in-focus/posts/2015/09/22-inequality-africa-sustainable-development-goals-bhorat">saying</a>: “Simply put, income inequality is the thief of the poverty-reducing effect of growth.”

The agriculture sector is a key priority area for expanding financial inclusion to combat income inequality. Rural dwellers are the most financially excluded people on the continent. Overwhelmingly, farmers lack access to all formal financial products – credit, savings, and insurance. Farmers need to both insure themselves against environmental risks, and make investments in seeds and other productive inputs to boost their productivity. Without insurance, they have to invest their earnings into dealing with emergencies like poor harvests, droughts/floods, and illness, rather than investing in boosting productivity. Their lack of access to loans and savings make them unable to respond to market opportunities, like buying fertilizers, pest control, and new equipment.

A transformed financing environment will allow the continent to tap into the vast potential of its domestic resources. Supporting farmers associations and the integration of financial services access therein can bring a wealth of benefits, including: increased access to financing via transactions records kept within associations; increased market access; and increased access to informational services and skills-building opportunities. Inclusive finance can also yield less intuitive benefits that boost productivity systemically. Kofi Annan, Chair of the Africa Progress Panel, asserts the potential for pension funds to – along with their imperative role in supporting aging - finance energy proliferation. In Ghana, Mozambique, and Nigeria, for example, pension funds have allowed governments to tap into deeper pools of savings that exist to actively finance the energy sector. Annan said: “One of the greatest barriers to the transformation of the power sector is the low level of tax collection and the failure of governments to build credible tax systems. Domestic taxes can cover almost half the financing gap in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Financial services also present huge opportunities for supporting education – one of the biggest factors to boosting equality. For every 100 African children that enter the school system, only four will make it to a tertiary institution. This is the lowest rate in the world. Savings and loans can offer families the support they need to ensure that their children are empowered to live productive lives.

The good news is that, along with the gradual expansion of traditional banking systems, peer-to-peer banking and mobile banking have increasingly taken root to further address the needs of those excluded from the financial system, democratize the financial playing field, and boost growth that benefits all. Among developing regions, mobile money is <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielrunde/2015/08/12/m-pesa-and-the-rise-of-the-global-mobile-money-market/#17edf1c723f5">most widespread</a> in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Southeast Asia and Latin America. Constantinos Kypreos, Vice President &amp; Senior Credit Officer at Moody’s and co-author of the report <a href="https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-Africas-mobile-phone-banking-boom-to-support-economic-growth--PR_343501">Mobile Banking Supportive of Economic Growth and Banking Sector Prospects</a>, stated in an <a href="https://audioboom.com/boos/4160830-driving-financial-inclusion-for-sub-saharan-africa-constantinos-kypreos-of-moodysratings-on-mobilephonebanking">interview</a> that with time, mobile phone banking will boost economic growth and create opportunities for banks to expand across the continent.

Developing the financial sector is one of the most urgent challenges facing the region. As the governor of Ghana’s central bank put it, “An efficient financial sector provides the rudiments for income growth and job creation [and]…financial development contributes to the reduction of poverty and inequality.” The Shaking up Finance and Banking in Africa brief concludes that inclusive financial systems serve as the bridge that connects economic growth to the wellbeing of people. We at the Center for Financial Inclusion agree.

Image credit: Accion

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Sustainable and Inclusive Finance Is Key to Africa’s (Equitable) Economic Transformation

&gt; Posted by Andrew Fixler, Freelance Journalist

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/38476503@N08/21760883046/"><img class="alignright wp-image-20783" style="border:0 solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/21760883046_408ce22872_z.jpg?w=490" alt="" width="330" height="220" /></a>Consolidation and investment in coffee brands is reaching a fever pitch, according to Andrew Daday, Director of Coffee for <a href="https://www.stumptowncoffee.com/">Stumptown Roasters</a>. Coffee is the second-most traded commodity in the world, and the modal coffee farmer is a smallholder living near or below the poverty line, resulting in unique value chains in Latin America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. These value chains are characterized by factors like the <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/university/commodities/commodities2.asp">commodity coffee markets</a>, agronomics, organization/associations of growers, government coffee marketing institutions, and the state of rural financial services. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialty_coffee">Specialty coffee</a> is characterized by meeting particular quality standards. Specialty coffee production allows some farmers to escape the vicissitudes of the commodity coffee market and to capture value commensurate with their product’s quality and input costs. In the United States, <a href="http://www.scaa.org/?page=resources&amp;d=facts-and-figures">55 percent</a> of the 48 billion dollars of coffee retail value consumed falls into the specialty category – representing immense growth in recent decades. If bullishness ratifies the growth prospects for high-end coffee in the U.S. and abroad, it is worth looking into how scaling will manifest at the agricultural end of the value chain, because the relationships coffee farmers have with downstream firms impact their well-being in a number of ways, including via their access to financing.

Agriculture finance for smallholders can be an operationally-intensive, high-risk enterprise. However, financial institutions like the Netherlands’ Rabobank and Mexico’s Banorte <a href="http://www.fao.org/docrep/017/i0846e/i0846e.pdf">express</a> that agricultural credit is especially viable and profitable if “producers are well-integrated into a viable value chain.” Linking into a larger firm’s supply chain is a boon to small business growth in many contexts. Besides serving as a “<a href="https://nycfuture.org/pdf/Giving_Small_Firms_the_Business.pdf">springboard for growth</a>” for small businesses from increased market access, buyer-supplier linkages yield exposure to key industry information and data points along the value chain that contribute to better capital allocation and financial accessibility for qualified entrepreneurs. Linking with a value chain may also <a href="https://www.microlinks.org/good-practice-center/value-chain-wiki/value-chain-finance">enable</a> a transition from informal lending, which can rely overwhelmingly on local knowledge for underwriting, to the formal financial services sector.

Viability of financing increases when value chain linkages are stronger and are used as intangible collateral. While building relationships with farmers, buyers consider smallholder attributes similar to those examined by credit underwriters. This translates into easier screening of potential borrowers, disbursement and repayment of loans, and management of collateral and risk. A detailed understanding of the quality of value chain linkages can further assure lenders of farmers’ future revenue streams. Lead firms in the value chain depend on supplier quality and resilience, so they may actively play a role in facilitating outside financing, or in rarer cases directly finance their partners through product and receivables financing.

In specialty coffee, value chain integration is diligently forged. The <a href="http://www.scaa.org/chronicle/2012/02/14/direct-trade-the-questions-answers/">direct trade</a> model is defined by a transparent relationship between farmer and roaster starting with contract negotiation, and continuing through a long-term alignment of interest in the farm’s growth, stability, and sustainability. Scalability is built on a knowledge network supported by government coffee institutes and international coffee raters, like the Cup of Excellence or Coffee Analysts, as well as roasting companies. In different manifestations of specialty coffee trade, this network is tapped in order to scale the number of producers as demand grows. So as coffee consumption grows, and the market share of specialty coffee increases, more farmers will enter close relationships with international firms.

For example, Starbucks runs <a href="http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/community/farmer-support/farmer-support-centers">Farmer Support Centers</a> to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=xRL32pfxl8gC&amp;pg=PA123&amp;lpg=PA123&amp;dq=starbucks+farmer+support+center+costa+rica+value+chain+finance&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=3SSBDQ0BaU&amp;sig=WCgKAGGOsmXCnfI795B-XKssiQg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiygoKjmezKAhULMz4KHUGfDF4Q6AEIMzAD#v=onepage&amp;q=starbucks%20farmer%20support%20center%20costa%20rica%20value%20chain%20finance&amp;f=false">ensure</a> the company can meet growing demand. They administer an array of resources and support to growers, and bring new farmers into the company’s fold.

Specialty coffee allows farmers to recoup investments in increased quality by assuring that their produce will be processed and sold by a series of actors that will recognize the beans’ quality and distinctive identity. Additionally, the degree to which coffee farmers capture returns on their products’ distinct value attributes <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=mwpAO0J9ojgC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PR8&amp;dq=history+of+coffee+commodity&amp;ots=iESGIxaVI-&amp;sig=VwMnMFr3BYKA9h8D2KKy3G8Z55M#v=onepage&amp;q=history%20of%20coffee%20commodity&amp;f=false">determines a significant component of their market power</a>. Daday explained that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_wave_of_coffee">third wave coffee roasters</a> (specialty coffee roasters which consider coffee more an artisanal foodstuff than commodity) buy beans from a single origin in shipping container-sized quantities, and at a premium price. This further entrenches a mutual dependence, and cements the negotiational potence of specialty coffee producers relative to their counterparts who sell coffee destined for the commodity market.

Beyond the rarified world of third wave coffee roasters, retailers are investing in their value chains, often with regard for the financial externalities this avails to their businesses and those of their partners. Starbucks’ Director of Coffee Sustainability and general manager of the Starbucks Agronomy Company notes in a <a href="http://www.fao.org/3/a-i0016e.pdf">2006 seminar</a> that sustainability and risk control are paramount in the company’s value chain. This might manifest in partnerships with impact investors who can finance growers with whom the coffee company hopes to build a long term relationship. Recently, Keurig Green Mountain, Coffee Cooperatives, Starbucks, and USAID partnered with Root Capital to target the Roya blight, a leaf rust endemic to Latin America which causes a <a href="http://www.fomin.org/en-us/Home/FOMINblog/Blogs/DetailsBlog/ArtMID/13858/ArticleID/2179/NoTitleLink.aspx">half billion dollars in losses</a> annually when left unmitigated. Their <a href="http://www.rootcapital.org/about-us/press-releases/usaid-keurig-green-mountain-cooperative-coffees-starbucks-and-root-capital">efforts</a> will allocate $23 million, including $15 million in investment capital, to technical assistance and farm-rehabilitation efforts. Part of the technical assistance includes advice on negotiating ongoing Roya prevention costs into contracts.

From coffee to cocoa to other crops, there are roughly 500 million smallholder farmers around the world. As lessons learned in supply chain sophistication and agriculture financing amass in the growing artisanal produce and mass market grocery industries alike, the prospects for entrepreneurial smallholders may significantly brighten.

Image credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/38476503@N08/21760883046/">CIAT</a>

This post was modified from its original version on March 4, 2016.

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Coffee Connections: Improving Smallholder Inclusion through Value Chain Finance

Editor's Note: Eric Noggle worked at Microfinance Opportunities when this research was conducted and published.

In 2014, <a href="http://fsdzambia.org/">Financial Sector Deepening Zambia</a> and <a href="https://www.microfinanceopportunities.org/">Microfinance Opportunities</a> (MFO) began the Zambia Financial Diaries—a 52-week study of the financial lives of 352 low-income Zambians. The study included 92 smallholder farmers—individuals who own small plots of land on which they grew crops or tended livestock for sale and/or subsistence.

The Zambian smallholder farmers represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 500 million smallholder households worldwide. Smallholder farmers are a large livelihood group and addressing their diverse needs—from crop diversification to market integration—is a strategic priority for the World Bank Group, country-level governments, and non-government organizations.

Understanding smallholder farmers’ income patterns is critical for designing financial services that meet their financial needs. The common perception of farmers’ income patterns is that they are lumpy and linked to agricultural cycles, but the income patterns identified in MFO’s Zambia Financial Diaries challenge this perception.
<h2>Income Patterns</h2>
<a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-12.png"><img class="alignright wp-image-20735" style="border: 1px solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-12.png" alt="" width="350" height="88" /></a>The farmers in MFO’s study had lower and more variable incomes than respondents who earned the majority of their income from informal, off-farm sources (“informal workers”). The farmers had 4.3 income sources on average, often relying on casual labor or running informal shops to supplement their agricultural activities, while informal workers had 3.3 sources. Farmers’ average weekly earnings were low—only about $19 per week on average compared to $50 for informal workers (based on June 2015 exchange rates). The farmers also experienced more week-to-week income variation, as measured by the coefficient of variation (COV), than other respondents who work in the informal economy.

However, these data mask the diversity of smallholder farmers’ income patterns. The study found farmers who earned large sums frequently, while others had large and inconsistent windfalls. Lower-income farmers also had diverse patterns, with some earning small sums on a frequent basis while others went weeks between earning income.

<a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-23.png"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-20737" style="border: 1px solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-23.png" alt="" width="615" height="232" /></a>

MFO developed a simple market segmentation framework to understand the role of income patterns in financial service design better. The framework comprises two dimensions: average weekly income and week-to-week income variation as measured by the COV. We divided respondents into high- or low-income groups at the median of average weekly income and high- or low-variation groups at the median of the COV.

&nbsp;
<h2><a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-32.png"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-20738" style="border: 1px solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-32.png" alt="" width="615" height="299" /></a></h2>
<h2>Implications of Segmenting by Income Behavior</h2>
The segmentation framework demonstrates the diversity of smallholder farmers’ income patterns and their similarity to the income patterns of informal workers. This finding should encourage stakeholders to prioritize collecting information about consumers’ income patterns when designing financial services for the low-income market segment. The financial needs of a smallholder farmer with high, steady income are more similar to those of a micro-entrepreneur with the same income pattern than a smallholder farmer who irregularly earns small sums. Recognizing these inter-livelihood similarities can help stakeholders mitigate inefficiencies in the design, marketing, and delivery of financial services.

&nbsp;

<a href="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-41.png"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-20739" style="border: 1px solid #000000" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/figure-41.png" alt="" width="615" height="232" /></a>

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Stakeholders focused specifically on smallholder farmers should consider the needs and opportunities that these income patterns suggest. For instance, a farmer with high income and high variation may benefit from interventions that allow the farmer to diversify on- and off-farm income sources. This diversification could lead to more consistent annual income. A farmer with high income and low variation may be best suited for interventions that support the expansion of farming activities through asset financing or linkages with local markets. Farmers with low-income and high variation may struggle to piece together the income necessary to purchase inputs during the planting season; thus, a layaway product might be beneficial for them. Cash transfers from government agencies or non-governmental organizations would help farmers with low-income and low variation pay basic on- and off-farm expenses that their meager earnings cannot cover.

Income patterns alone should not inform the design of financial services for smallholder farmers, but they are a critical component in the process. MFO’s hope is that this study and other research can help improve the efficacy of interventions meant to help this diverse group.

For more information on the research methodology and additional findings, please read the <a href="https://www.microfinanceopportunities.org/?p=2824">Zambia Financial Diaries Interim Report</a>.

Have you read?

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/09/10/pay-for-performance-operationalizing-the-embedded-education-model/">Pay-For-Performance: Operationalizing the Embedded Education Model</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/06/11/climate-change-adaptation-for-smallholder-farmers/">Climate Change Adaptation for Smallholder Farmers</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/11/01/what-is-financial-capability/">What Is "Financial Capability?"</a>

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Using Income Patterns to Segment Livelihood Groups: The Case of Smallholder Farmers

China’s economy has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, with a booming micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) market. There are over 50 million MSMEs in China that collectively account for over 60% of China’s GDP and over 50% of the government’s tax income. These businesses create 80% of total employment in China’s urban areas.

Despite China’s overall economic growth, the need to foster full financial inclusion is still imperative. In 2010, 38 million MSMEs lacked access to formal financial services, forcing them to borrow informally from friends, family, and moneylenders.

India is a global leader in financial inclusion. For over a decade, Accion has worked with and learned from India’s innovators, investors, and policymakers to expand economic opportunity for its people and businesses.

Though Nigeria’s government has set ambitious goals for financial inclusion, the majority of its people lack a formal bank account. Accion has worked in the country since 2007 to expand access to financial services.

&gt; Posted by Center Staff

<a href="http://newsfeed.financialinclusion2020.org/"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-18655" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fi2020-issue-five.png" alt="fi2020 issue five" width="614" height="329" /></a>

Good afternoon! Freshly published is this week’s Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, sharing the big news in banking the unbanked. Among its stories are a new partnership between MetLife Foundation and Opportunity International to expand financing and skills training in rural China, the launch of a World Food Programme initiative that integrates climate risk reduction with financial services, and the release of the first annual Consumer Banking PACE Index, which gauges bank performance to consumer expectations. Here are a few more details:
<ul>
 	<li>MetLife Foundation and Opportunity International have embarked on a three-year partnership to support thousands of small businesses in rural China with financial services and business development training via banks, mobile vans, and rural service centers.</li>
 	<li>The World Food Programme launched the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, which helps smallholder famers in Zambia navigate environmental demands using index-based agricultural insurance, improved natural resource management, credit, savings, and productive safety nets.</li>
 	<li>The new Consumer Banking PACE Index, drawing on input from over 9,000 consumers, examines bank performance in a handful of countries around the world to conclude that, among other findings, fair and transparent pricing falls below consumer expectations, and trust in banks remains an issue.</li>
</ul>
For more information on these and other stories, read the fifth issue of the FI2020 News Feed <a href="http://newsfeed.financialinclusion2020.org/">here</a>, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.

Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to us at <a href="mailto:ezuehlke@accion.org">ezuehlke@accion.org</a>.

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Rural Finance in China, Climate Risk Reduction, Meeting Consumer Expectations – the Latest FI2020 News Feed

&gt; Posted by Center Staff

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEZcvzGg7m4&amp;w=560&amp;h=315]

Yesterday a digital finance event in Bogota hosted by the Colombian government and the Better Than Cash Alliance celebrated a pioneering business-to-business electronic banking program that’s led to over 300,000 Colombian coffee farmers receiving access to formal banking services. Launched in 2006 by the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC), the Smart Coffee ID Card program offers the farmers represented by FNC with a dual identification/e-banking card that can be used for payments, debits, and savings. It now encompasses over 8 million transactions totaling nearly $1 billion. The event launched a Better Than Cash Alliance <a href="http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/rural-financial-inclusion-study-shows-colombias-smart-coffee-id-is-model-replicate-1986417.htm" target="_blank">case study</a> on the Smart Coffee ID Card program, which finds that the FNC initiative is a benchmark example of how transitioning from cash to e-payments in emerging economies can lead to increased safety, productivity, growth, and greater quality of life.

For Smart Coffee ID cardholders, the identification components give farmers access to FNC services, such as participating in coffee grower elections, while the banking component, backed by Banco de Bogota, enables banking online or at 230,000 commercial establishments. A savings account has been paired with the Smart Coffee ID Card since 2014. Card use also allows farmers to develop a banking history and in turn obtain lines of credit.

For the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, the program improves institutional organization and farmer payment efficiency. It also helps with payment flexibility – especially helpful in incidences like emergency support. Through the cards’ ability to offer farmers incentives cost-effectively, the program has helped facilitate sustainable farming practices. At the event in Bogota, Julian Medina, FNC’s Chief Financial Officer said, "Without the Smart Coffee ID Card, FNC initiatives to combat climate change, such as encouraging growers to plant more productive and coffee leaf rust-resistant tree varieties and implementing ambitious plant renovation programs to improve yields, would have been impossible to develop." More recently the card network has been leveraged for providing government incentives and credits.

The Better than Cash Alliance case study on the Smart Coffee ID Card program is the first study to examine a cash-to-electronic payment transition in a large-scale rural business-to-business context. The event in Bogota also launched a <a href="http://betterthancash.org/news-releases/partners-should-build-on-progress-made-in-colombias-shift-to-electronic-payments-says-study-by-un-based-alliance/" target="_blank">Colombian market diagnostic</a>, which found that Colombia has made big progress in the shift to e-payments, but that there’s room for improvement in addressing the informal cash economy and strengthening merchant acceptance and consumer adoption.

Colombia is considered a “cash-light” economy, as 69 percent of money is spent electronically. However, most payments are still conducted via cash. In 2012, less than 10 percent of the 828 million payments were made electronically. Essentially, large payments are made digitally, and most small and medium ones are made in cash.

The government has been a leader in furthering Colombia’s transition to electronic payments. About 94 percent of government payments by monetary value and 76 percent by volume are made electronically.

The Better Than Cash Alliance’s diagnostic indicates that Colombia’s area for greatest improvement in shifting to e-payments is consumer purchases. Barriers to expansion include: high costs for merchants to support payment card programs; limited value proposition for banks expanding their networks; and consumer access to card services.

Have you read?

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/06/20/electronic-g2p-for-the-poor-does-electronic-social-protection-need-better-consumer-protection/" target="_blank">Electronic G2P for the Poor: Does Electronic Social Protection Need Better Consumer Protection?</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/04/24/new-council-to-expand-responsible-financing-for-agriculture/" target="_blank">New Council to Expand Responsible Financing for Agriculture</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/09/09/pending-presidential-approval-colombias-financial-inclusion-bill-set-to-become-law/" target="_blank">Pending Presidential Approval: Colombia's Financial Inclusion Bill Set to Become Law</a>

Banking Services Extended to 300,000 Colombian Coffee Growers

&gt; Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/14843496@N02/5031042480/"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-16938" style="margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px" src="https://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/5031042480_2fc5f4ac8e_z.jpg" alt="" width="610" height="405" /></a>If you are in a wheelchair in Guatemala, lots of nice people will be willing to carry you up the stairs… But that’s not the point. A recent conversation with Alan Tenenbaum, a disability inclusion advocate based in Guatemala, offered me that perspective. Tenenbaum, who became a quadriplegic after suffering a spinal cord injury in his late twenties, focuses his work on the Latin American country. Those looking to advance disability inclusion in Guatemala, like in most countries, have their work cut out for them. Countrywide, according to <a href="http://www.teamaroundthechild.com/images/stories/journal-pdfs/Guatemala.pdf">Team Around the Child</a>, less than two percent of Guatemalan adults with disabilities have work, most children with disabilities do not attend school, and only a small percentage of those in need of wheelchairs have one. To date, according to a <a href="http://www.trickleup.org/media/publications/upload/Disability-Poverty-Livelihoods-Guidance-from-Trickle-Up-small-file-2.pdf">recent paper</a> from Trickle Up, most efforts to advance disability inclusion in Guatemala have been limited to urban areas – even though 50 percent of the country’s population resides in rural areas, where economic opportunities are harder to come by.

I sat down with Tenenbaum to get a sense for progress made and challenges still present in Guatemala for persons with disabilities (PwDs). Since his injury, Tenenbaum wrote a book sharing his story, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/En-Silla-Morfeo-Spanish-Edition/dp/9929403892">En la Silla de Morfeo</a> (On Morpheus' Chair), started and led a foundation, <a href="http://www.alantenenbaumw.com/#!fundacion/c1jz6">Sigue Avanzando</a>, and has regularly given speeches for schools, universities, news outlets, and private companies. At the heart of these efforts is what he identifies as the biggest barrier to disability inclusion: public awareness.

In Guatemala, and in most Latin American countries, Tenenbaum says, “I want to think that [disability inclusion] is not a matter of immorality, but of ignorance. I believe that here you become aware of the exclusion only when you or someone very close to you has a disability. When you live with it, then you realize how bad and overdue our countries are with this subject.”

Globally, about 15 percent of people have a disability, according to the World Health Organization, making this the largest vulnerable population in the world. Within this group, 82 percent live in developing countries and 20 percent live in extreme poverty.

Tenenbaum’s foundation, among the groups in Guatemala working to combat these statistics, focuses specifically on those with spinal cord injuries and those in wheelchairs. Sigue Avanzando provides educational resources, organizes sports and community-building activities, advocates for infrastructure changes, and works to build public awareness.

Another Guatemala-based organization, <a href="http://transitionsfoundation.org/index.php">Transitions</a> runs a wheelchair manufacturing workshop that’s staffed entirely by individuals in wheelchairs. The chairs are custom made for their recipients and are given away free or for a nominal price. The organization offers education, healthcare, skills-based training, and assistance with social integration, as well.

As a reader of this blog, you’re likely aware of the potential of microfinance to ameliorate the intensifying cycle between disability and poverty. You might also know that current estimates indicate that less than one percent of microfinance clients around the world are PwDs. In Guatemala, for all potential client segments, there is huge room for growth in the microfinance market. According to the Global Findex, only 22 percent of adults, and only 13 percent of the bottom two quintiles of the economic pyramid, have a bank account at a formal financial institution.

CFI has worked with partner MFIs and organizations around the world to <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/programs-a-projects/pwd">sound the call</a> for financial inclusion for PwDs, <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/publications-a-resources/browse-publications/603-making-microfinance-accessible-to-persons-with-disabilities-awareness-and-attitudes-among-indian-microfinance-institutions">identify issues</a> among providers that impede inclusivity, and <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/programs-a-projects/pwd/framework-for-persons-with-disabilities">equip them with the tools and resources</a> to bring on PwDs as <a href="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/josh_goldstein_keynote_uganda_11-14.pdf">viable</a> clients.

Between 2010 and 2013, Trickle Up developed and implemented an economic strengthening project for PwDs in Guatemala, applying an approach that combines grants, savings, and skills training. Their paper shares pitfalls and lessons from the project, and serves as a guide to encourage and assist other organizations in including PwDs in similar programs. Reflective of Guatemala’s needs, the project paid special attention to PwDs in rural areas.

Mobile money holds great potential for furthering inclusion in Guatemala. Although a small portion of the population is formally banked, and mobile money has <a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/09/22/adopting-digital-financial-services-in-guatemala/">yet to take off</a> in the country, mobile phone penetration is high: there are 8.8 million unique subscribers in the 15.5 million total population. Mobile money could help sidestep some of the logistical and transportation challenges of PwDs.

The general lack of awareness of disability inclusion is signaled in the parking lots of Guatemala. According to Tenenbaum, “Most establishments don’t even have handicap parking spaces. And if they do, they’re not made with the specifications needed. And if they are, someone without a disability parks there without caring!”

Though this all could be changing and very soon. Through my window to the disability inclusion movement at CFI, I’ve seen powerful momentum building in recent years. Our PwD inclusion work at CFI has gained <a href="http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/programs-a-projects/pwd/">traction around the world</a>. Just last month, the UNDP released a policy paper, <a href="http://www.inclusivefinanceindia.org/uploads/news_attachments/20141213051342_pollicy-paper---financial-inclusion-of-excluded-segment.pdf">Financial Inclusion of Excluded Segments – Learning from Experience Delivery of Financial Services to Persons with Disabilities</a>, based on our work in India. And some of the biggest names in the development community – <a href="http://blog.brac.net/2014/07/inclusive-microfinance-putting-the-ability-into-disability/">like BRAC</a> – have also joined the fight.

Progress on exclusionary infrastructure should soon accelerate in Guatemala. According to Tenenbaum, construction companies were offered incentives to meet disability requirements in the past. But now those requirements have become law.

Image credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/14843496@N02/5031042480/">Mario Bollini</a>

Have you read?

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/01/13/a-how-to-guide-to-realizing-disability-inclusion-at-mfis-is-now-available/" target="_blank">A How-To Guide to Realizing Disability Inclusion at MFIs Is Now Available</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/09/05/disability-inclusivity-and-the-smart-campaign-at-fundacion-paraguaya/" target="_blank">Disability Inclusivity and the Smart Campaign at Fundacion Paraguaya</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/09/22/adopting-digital-financial-services-in-guatemala/" target="_blank">Adopting Digital Financial Services in Guatemala</a>

Guatemala Rolls Toward Disability Inclusion

&gt; Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI

[getty src="109419838?et=wrMxf-Q2TRdxTBXqYCmUYg&amp;socialOnLoad=on&amp;sig=2LGi234vtYBMz1QZLFdV4uOsgtLMQyoJ2cNAMuCzQ3o=" width="594" height="394"]

Last week the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) <a href="http://www.philstar.com/business/2014/12/05/1399185/microfinance-loans-continue-rise">announced</a> substantial increases throughout the country’s microfinance market: growth in the volume of loans dispersed to microentrepreneurs, in the number of microcredit institutions offering savings services, and in the return on equity of rural banks with microfinance operations. Concerning regulation and institutional support, the recently released <a href="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/eiu_global_microscope_2014.pdf">2014 Global Microscope</a> found that the Philippines has the best environment in Asia for financial inclusion.

In 2014, loans extended to microentrepreneurs in the Philippines totaled <a href="http://www.philstar.com/business/2014/12/05/1399185/microfinance-loans-continue-rise">P9.3 billion</a> (US$209 million) as of June, according to figures reported by BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. at the recent Citi Microentrepreneurship Awards in Manila – a roughly 7 percent increase over last year’s figure. On savings, in early 2012 only 22 banks in the country offered micro-deposit accounts. Now, 69 of the Philippines’ 183 banks with microcredit operations take deposits, with a total of 1.7 million micro-deposit accounts. Beyond credit and savings, <a href="http://www.interaksyon.com/business/100511/microfinance-shows-way-for-profitable-low-risk-banking-business-says-bangko-sentral" target="_blank">86</a> of the country’s institutions offering microcredit also provide microinsurance and 26 provide electronic banking services.

During his speech, <a href="http://www.philstar.com/business/2014/12/05/1399185/microfinance-loans-continue-rise">Tetangco said</a>, “It is clear microfinance has become a viable proposition for banks. In fact, we can say that microfinance as a medium for financial inclusion has strengthened the institutional stability of banks by generating reliable business opportunities.” Over the last four years, the return on equity of rural banks with microfinance operations was on average <a href="http://www.interaksyon.com/business/100511/microfinance-shows-way-for-profitable-low-risk-banking-business-says-bangko-sentral">three percent</a> higher than that of the rural banking sector as a whole. Additionally, the ratio of non-performing loans of rural lenders offering microfinance is now very slightly below the industry average.

The 2014 Global Microscope, the EIU’s annual examination and ranking of the inclusiveness of countries’ financial sectors, found the Philippines to be <a href="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/eiu_global_microscope_2014.pdf">the best country in Asia</a> and the third best country in the world after Peru and Colombia. Tetangco <a href="http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/390866/economy/moneyandbanking/microfinance-key-to-financial-inclusion-in-phl-bangko-sentral-chief">highlighted</a> the country’s Microscope ranking, noting that the report singled out the Philippines’ highly capable regulator, credit regulation, and effective dispute-resolution mechanisms. Peru, Colombia, and the Philippines (with scores of 87, 85, and 79) ranked considerably higher than the next highest scoring countries, Chile, Mexico, and India (66, 61, and 61).

The Philippines’ financial inclusion efforts enjoy proactive leadership at the national government level. It was the first country in the world to establish an office dedicated to financial inclusion, the Inclusive Finance Advocacy Staff. The Philippines’ national financial inclusion strategy has specific goals and commitments, many of which have already been implemented, including financial education initiatives.

Much room for additional outreach remains, however, as only 27 percent of the adult population has a deposit account, according to the Global Findex. The archipelago country of 7,000 islands presents great physical challenges for reaching the unbanked. To date, the vast majority of financial services are concentrated in urban and semi-urban areas. New Findex figures are due out in the first half of 2015. That’s when we will be able to tell whether enabling policies are actually paying off in the form of rising inclusion.

For more on the Philippines’ financial inclusion environment, including additional challenges, read the <a href="http://centerforfinancialinclusionblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/eiu_global_microscope_2014.pdf">2014 Global Microscope</a>.

Have you read?

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2013/07/16/savings-overtakes-loans-in-the-philippines/">Savings Overtakes Loans in the Philippines</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2012/09/10/serving-persons-with-disabilities-in-the-philippines/">Serving Persons with Disabilities in the Philippines</a>

<a href="http://cfi-blog.org/2014/11/10/the-global-microscope-2014-results-and-surprises/">The 'Global Microscope 2014': Results and Surprises</a>

Asia’s Top Country on Financial Inclusion Policy, the Philippines, Strengthens Its Microfinance Market