Bob Summers
13 Nov 2025
About one in six people worldwide are living with a disability, including many of our colleagues and clients.
About one in six people worldwide are living with a disability, including many of our colleagues and clients.
People with disabilities (PWDs) often are excluded from financial services and jobs for irrelevant reasons, such as stereotyping and bias. Barriers to education and social inclusion early in life can snowball into poverty and lack of confidence. However, financial services providers across the world have shown that focusing on this segment can lead to a better bottom line and a stronger workforce.
Fundación Paraguaya has trained 165 staff members to work with PWDs, including staff at all levels of the organization. For example, security guards are instructed to make sure PWDs feel welcome when arriving at a branch location. The NGO did not develop new products for PWDs, rather it adapted its existing training materials and contracts. At the start, Fundación Paraguaya used grant funding to make these changes, but it no longer needs the subsidy. Over about 10 years, it has provided financial services to 2,360 PWDs, including issuing 8,500 loans to PWDs and their families. In one cohort, the rate of poverty went down from 73% to 60% during 10 loan cycles.
Opportunity Bank Uganda Limited (OBUL) did find that it needed to tailor its products for PWDs in its market. For example, it offers savings accounts with lower minimum balances. The bank also has performed a wide range of sensitization efforts in partnership with NGOs that serve PWDs, including producing a television drama to reduce the stigma of living with disabilities. Some process changes that were intended to help PWDs ended up benefiting all of OBUL’s clients. One of these was digitizing group loan meetings to improve transparency and reduce the duration of meetings by about half.
Over 12 years of serving PWDs, OBUL has found that it works best to assign dedicated staff to the effort. Sensitization to the needs of PWDs has also boosted the bank’s pool of potential employees, with its portion of staff with disabilities now at 5%.
When Palmis Enèji of Haiti started to focus on serving PWDs, it was quite a new concept to the staff. During initial discussions, only about half were enthusiastic about the idea. However, due to the institution’s focus on serving people with very low incomes, it found that working with PWDs was not a big leap. To be successful, Palmis had to improve access to its physical branches as well as its communications channels. The process included sharing stories of role models to create awareness, training loan officers on inclusion, making documents and meetings more accessible, and dropping the requirement that new clients visit a branch to enroll in services. These improvements benefited all Palmis customers, not just PWDs. For recruitment, Palmis partnered with NGOs that serve PWDs. The result was access to loans for 196 people, with 84% successfully creating profitable enterprises. These clients put their profits into education, housing improvements and growing their businesses. Importantly, these profits also increased PWDs’ perceptions of themselves and their neighbors’ perceptions of them as valued members of their communities.
This content was presented at IF25, which is hosted by e-MFP which has about 120 members, each of which supports the provision of financial services in lower income countries.