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Author: Bobbi Gray - Grameen Foundation USA
Next up in our series of guest blogs on the topic of the European Microfinance Award 2023 – Inclusive Finance for Food Security & Nutrition – Bobbi Gray from Grameen Foundation considers the (intolerable) sacrifices that poor households make to meet their financial services obligations, and the responsibility of the sector to address this.

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Author: Anne Marie van Swinderen
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.

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Author: Celia Fernandez - Joana Afonso
The e-MFP Investors AG and Cerise+SPTF, through SPTF’s Outcomes Working Group and Cerise’s LabODD (SDG Lab), have been working on outcomes management and measurement since 2015. Successive projects have raised awareness among different stakeholders and developed tools to support the necessary and complex task of measuring client outcomes, analysing the findings and converting these findings into action - managerial decisions to improve existing programs and design new products and services that effectively respond to different clients’ needs. Our latest blog takes the pulse and presents the fruits of this on-going collaboration.

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Author: Myka Reinsch Sinclair
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.

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Author: Weselina Angelow - Scale2Save Programme Director WSBI
A basic account is a secure entry point for previously unbanked people to become more resilient. It also opens a wealth of opportunities – for investing in education, or growing their businesses. A six-year partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and WSBI, Scale2Save is a programme to establish the viability of low–balance savings accounts and to understand the extent to which savings allow vulnerable people to boost their financial resilience and wellbeing. Weselina Angelow, Scale2Save Programme Director, presents the programme, findings and the way ahead in our latest blog.

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Author: Célia Fernandez - Amelia Greenberg
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.

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Author: Myka Reinsch Sinclair
With the European microfinance community focusing special attention on women’s financial inclusion and celebrating the impressive work of the 2022 European Microfinance Award finalists, the publication of an updated edition of Alex Counts’ 'Small Loans, Big Dreams: Grameen Bank and the Microfinance Revolution in Bangladesh, America and Beyond' could not be better timed. As an inclusive finance practitioner with over two decades of experience working at the level of communities, financial institutions and the broader sector around the globe, I found this book particularly inspiring as we look toward new horizons in women’s financial inclusion.

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Author: Bobbi Gray - Piyush Singh
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.

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Author: Marina Dimova - Womens World Banking
Although nearly 250 million women in developing countries finally have some form of access to financial services, 742 million women – three times that many! – still have no access at all. To put this staggering number into perspective, if these women made up a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world. Furthermore, there are an additional 246 million women with inactive bank accounts, underscoring the fact that access to financial services does not always equate to usage. These last 742 million women are the most difficult to reach for several reasons: they are typically located in rural areas with no connectivity or access to mobile phones and constitute the least educated and poorest demographic in their respective regions.

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Author: Inez Murray - Financial Alliance for Women
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.

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