Blogs

e-MFP is delighted to welcome Low-Income Financial Transformation – L-IFT – as one of its newest members. L-IFT is a research organisation committed to empowering communities through data. L-IFT strives to make anonymised data accessible to all as a utility service, continuously building evidence to support the work of the financial inclusion and other sectors. In a guest blog L-IFT’s managing director Anne Marie van Swinderen introduces Business Diaries (BuD) as the successor to the Small Firm Diaries, outlines the differences and future plans, and the role of the Android app and data portal FINBIT in the project.

Kicking off a series of guest blogs on the topic of the European Microfinance Award 2023 – Inclusive Finance for Food Security & Nutrition – EMA2023 consultant (and e-MFP member) Myka Reinsch Sinclair outlines the scale of the challenge, and the role that financial inclusion organisations can play in combatting food insecurity and malnutrition.

Kicking off our guest blog series of the year, e-MFP members Cerise+SPTF present the new SPI Online platform giving the background to its development and the evolution of social performance management in the financial inclusion sector.

Around the world, women do between two to ten times more care work than men, with countries like Ghana and India on the extreme end. Time poverty and caretaking responsibilities are indicated as particular barriers that constrain women’s economic participation. Female entrepreneurs interviewed by Grameen Foundation in Northern Ghana note that household chores are “time consuming, making our business less productive” and the nature of household chores “makes it difficult to [take] up certain businesses,” limiting both when women can work, as well as the types of businesses in which women can participate. Sociocultural gender roles that expect women to address the caretaking and household workload increase economic inequality amongst men and women. These constraints to economic participation limit women’s financial inclusion as well, for the very same reasons.

Although a lot of progress has been made, women are still disproportionately excluded from the formal financial system and make up more than half of the world’s unbanked population. There is also a significant opportunity to serve those women that are banked, more deeply. The female economy is a bigger than the GDP of China and India combined, but the financial services industry is still only beginning to unlock its full value. Financial institutions can positively impact their bottom lines and build a loyal customer base by serving the women’s market well.