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Author: Swati M. Dhawan
On World Refugee Day, we are happy to share with you the first in our series of guest blogs dedicated to the financial inclusion of refugees and forcibly displaced persons. We have invited Swati M. Dhawan to curate this series. In this first instalment, she presents the ‘Finance in Displacement' research collaboration to outline the particular barriers that refugees and displaced persons face.

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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: 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: 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: Sally Yacoub
As International Women’s Day comes around once more, the stubbornness of the gender financial inclusion gap lingers in my mind. Despite progress in women’s financial inclusion, the gender gap in account ownership has remained persistent - at 9% since 2011. I cannot help but think about Albert Einstein’s quote that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. As a collective global community, we need to do things differently; think differently and intervene differently. Thinking through the barriers to women’s financial inclusion, the persistence of the gender financial inclusion gap is not surprising. Financial services are introduced in contexts and ecosystems that have their own dynamics - which grants privileges for some and presents obstacles for others. Those barriers are often intricately interwoven. When it comes to financial inclusion, women face a broad range of barriers. Despite obvious differences in individual circumstances and needs, many women - particularly low-income women in developing contexts – share common features.

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Author: Gilles Renouil - Women’s World Banking
As leaders face the enormous challenge of reviving post-pandemic economies, financial inclusion plays a key role. But how do we ensure that incentives, tools and programs specifically designed for low income populations become commercially viable in their own right, and remain financially sustainable over the long term? In last month’s blog “Five to thrive Embedding health care in financial services”, Lisa Morgan and Craig Churchill from the International Labour Organization (ILO) highlighted that while the need is greater than ever, it’s not easy to design and deliver financial services that can help to finance health care for vulnerable groups. We at Women’s World Banking look back at 15 years of design and implementation of innovative health insurance programs for low-income populations and confirm that yes, it is not easy. Yet, Caregiver, our flagship insurance solution, provides a meaningful, affordable and sustainable life insurance and hospital cash solution to middle- and low income women (entrepreneurs) in developing countries, proving that with discipline and commitment it can be done.

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Author: Craig Churchill - Lisa Morgan
We laud e-MFP and the other European Microfinance Award organisers for highlighting, via this year’s Award, the potential impact that financial inclusion can have on health care. This is indeed a critical issue. For low-income households and microentrepreneurs, ill health can be financially catastrophic – eroding savings, depleting working capital, causing loan repayment defaults and exacerbating indebtedness. Health related financial risks are a primary driver of impoverishment. The WHO estimates that about 150 million people around the world suffer financial catastrophe each year from out-of-pocket expenditure on health services, while 100 million people fall below the poverty line.

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Author: Daniel Rozas - Sam Mendelson
“The first wealth is health,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. How particularly true this is for the global poor, for whom health is often the dividing line between the path to prosperity or a slide into destitution. To make matters worse, the combination of typically volatile and precarious incomes and the absence of high-quality universal health care where they live means low-income communities not only need access to health care, but also the ability to pay for it.

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Author: Weselina Angelow - Scale2Save Programme Director WSBI
These have been threatening times for financial service providers (FSPs) and customers. That’s especially true in Africa, where large-scale lockdowns across countries, besides causing economic setbacks for particularly low- and middle- income households, hit FSPs on many fronts. From office staff workarounds and increasing use of digital products for branch and agent operations and contact with informal groups, FSPs saw challenges unforeseen just a year ago. The pandemic has underscored the importance of a digital financial services-enabling environment and a refocus on the need to build financial health and resilience among the underserved and unbanked. Scale2Save – a programme active since 2016 – helps institutions in six African countries through the journey of navigating the rough waters of Covid-19.

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