The year 2022 marks an important anniversary in the field of economic development and poverty reduction. It was exactly 50 years ago that the shift from top-down industrial development to direct targeting of the poor began. The first salvo was launched by the International Labor Organization (ILO), whose April 1972 study of the persistent lack…
ACCESS has supported Vietnam’s microfinance sector since 2010. The following year, the government issued its microfinance development strategy, which raised hopes that the sector would enter a new growth phase that would enable it to make a significant contribution to financial inclusion. However, a decade later, the reality is that Viet Nam’s microfinance sector continues…
A decade ago, the finance ministers of the Asia-Pacific region established the Asia-Pacific Financial Inclusion Forum (APFIF) to identify policies and regulations that could expand the reach of financial services to the underserved, especially those at the base of the economy. Since its establishment in 2010, APFIF has contributed to policy reform and capacity building across…
Two economists who have spent their careers focused on understanding and fighting poverty, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, recently published an excerpt from their book Good Economics for Hard Times in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “How Poverty Ends: The Many Paths to Progress—and Why They Might Not Continue”. In it, they argue that no one…
As discussed in previous posts, most people engaged in farms and livelihood activities view them as a way to get by rather than get ahead. Lacking scale, they are inefficient. Lacking access to information and markets, they do not have the power to extract profit from market transactions. They pay more for their inputs (including…
The original rationale for expanding financial inclusion was that access to formal financial services enables low-income self-employed entrepreneurs and farmers to take advantage of market opportunities. Doing so was supposed to make it possible for them to expand their businesses, increasing their own incomes and creating employment for others. Yet in fact the architects of…
ACCESS Advisory started 11 years ago today. From a team of four in a one-room office in Manila, we have expanded to a team of more than 20 in seven countries across the Asia-Pacific region. Over the years, we have worked with hundreds of financial service providers to strengthen their organizational capacity and reached hundreds…
Last week we wrote about CGAP’s new “impact narrative for financial inclusion”, which no longer makes entrepreneurship and business development the primary rationale for expanding access to financial services. This week, we explore why they made such a dramatic change. CGAP’s change of heart may have been inevitable. While the various technologies that have been…
ACCESS Advisory is re-launching its blog! Join us here for discussions about financial inclusion, organization development, and farm and enterprise development. We begin by noting that CGAP recently published a new “impact narrative for financial inclusion”. This new vision identifies two sets of outcomes for low-income households who use financial services. The first is “resilience”––…
A tractor-rental app, an app providing information on markets, prices, weather, and other topics of importance to farmers, and an app linking agri-producers to financial service providers were some of digital technologies featured in the forum “Modernizing Myanmar’s Agriculture through Innovation” held on March 18, 2019. Organized by the US Agency for International Development (USAID),…
