ACCESS Advisory is a non-profit consulting firm whose mission is to improve performance, sustain operations and support growth of rural economic actors

MAKING FINANCIAL INCLUSION WORK
FOR THE RURAL ECONOMY

OUR DRIVING FORCE

Financial inclusion stakeholders know the empowering potential of financial services to improve the economic conditions of the poor, especially those in rural areas. However, empirical evidence to date shows that only 5-10% of clients experience a truly transformative increase in income. The full impact of financial inclusion is yet to be realized.

We created ACCESS Advisory to help make financial inclusion work for the rural economy.

Since 2009, ACCESS has worked with financial service providers, rural MSMEs, investors, regulators, NGOs, and other stakeholders to develop and test products and delivery channels that expand financial access to underserved rural farmers and entrepreneurs, and to understand and replicate the aspects of financial service usage that contribute the most to positive outcomes for them.

ACCESS Advisory believes that facilitating access to financial services alone is no longer sufficient. Complete financial inclusion means ensuring clients use financial services in a way that leads to a transformative improvement in their lives.

As consultants to financial institutions and other rural economic actors, our goal is to contribute to our partners’ long-term growth while they contribute to their clients’ economic well-being and sense of empowerment.

Applied
Cross
Cutting
Empowerment
Strategies &
Solutions

CONSULTING AND ADVISORY SERVICES
FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT

OUR COMPANY

ACCESS Advisory supports financial inclusion and farm and enterprise development across Asia, and has also worked in the Pacific, Africa, and Eastern Europe. A non-profit consultancy headquartered in Manila, ACCESS has two regional offices: a Greater Mekong office in Yangon, Myanmar and a South Asia regional office in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Technical assistance to expand financial inclusion remains at the heart of ACCESS’s work. However, ACCESS places equal emphasis on how financial and non-financial services are delivered and on how farmers rural MSME clients––ACCESS’s final target sector––use those services to create opportunities to increase their income.

Rural economic actors work with ACCESS on organizational development, staff capacity building and program evaluations, product development to help them reach out to smallholder farmers and rural MSMEs while strengthening risk management and client protection.

RESPECT ALL

OUR CORE VALUES

ACCESS Advisory is governed by its core values:

 

Responsive
Empowering
Service-oriented
Professional
Enterprising
Committed
Trustworthy

Accountability
Learning
Leadership

LEARNING THROUGH EXPERIENCE

OUR APPROACH

ACCESS is known for its highly participatory approach to delivering consulting and technical support. Rather than make decisions for our partners, our team guides our partners along a structured journey from identifying their needs to developing solutions that are most appropriate for them and over which they have full ownership.

Effectively building our clients’ capacity requires dialogue. ACCESS Advisory specializes in delivering knowledge transfer programs using the participatory approach embodied in adult learning principles.

ACCESS’s training program incorporates the experiential-based learning cycle (EBL) as a key contemporary pedagogical method.

In-depth consulting assignments are designed with our partners using the strategy map and balanced scorecard framework developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton.

GROW FURTHER, GROW BETTER

HOW WE WORK

Since its establishment, ACCESS has worked in partnership with numerous financial institutions, MSMEs, international and local NGOs, government agencies, and funding organizations.

Through its diagnostics and research as well as its technical assistance, ACCESS’s team members provide advice and support based on proprietary information. ACCESS has become a trusted partner of these organizations by demonstrating:

  • Integrity: ACCESS strives to provide the best analysis it can in order to support its partners and clients, even if sometimes this means asking difficult questions or addressing sensitive issues.
  • Independence: ACCESS is a legally independent entity with its own governing board, and its work is driven by building mutually-supportive partnerships with other organizations for the purposes of attaining the shared goal of rural development.
  • Impartiality: ACCESS’s core business is in rural development and it views other organizations in the field as collaborators rather than competitors.
  • Confidentiality: ACCESS maintains strict confidentiality and protects privacy with regard to information provided by its partners and clients

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

ABOUT OUR LOGO

ACCESS’s logo is based on the famous “Nine-Dot Puzzle”, whose challenge is to connect 9 dots arranged in a square with only 4 straight lines. The solution requires drawing lines outside the boundaries of the square formed by the dots:

The puzzle is an exercise in “out of the box thinking”.

The colors used in the logo represent key aspects of ACCESS’s approach to its work:

  • Blue signifies the trust and responsibility which are the foundation of friendship, unity, and peace that our work has elicited between and among our clients
  • Green represents increasing growth and wealth for our clients who availed our assistance and services
  • Yellow conveys the “wick” of hope, optimism and enlightenment that we effected on our clients for a better and bright future
  • Red signifies flame in our desire and passion we put in the performance of our professional functions and duties

The colors also represent fields of ACCESS’s consulting expertise:

  • Green: financial inclusion
  • Yellow: organizational development
  • Red: farm and rural business development

ACCESS’s consultants, represented in blue, sit in between all three areas of expertise.

The arrow formed by drawing the line through all nine dots points upward and to the right, signifying growth and development, and points toward red, representing ACCESS’s ultimate goal of farm and enterprise development as the key contributor to transformative change for rural economic actors.

YOUR PARTNER FOR THE FUTURE

OUR CLIENTS AND PARTNERS

Our Clients

EXPERIENCE YOU CAN TRUST

OUR TEAM

Our team draws on years of experience in financial inclusion and rural development in Asia to design tools and methods for delivering support to our clients and partners.

Whether advising management, coaching staff or training clients, our goal is to help our partners develop the skills, systems and products needed to to drive operational performance for rural economic actors.