The Better Than Cash Alliance is a partnership of governments, companies, and international organizations that accelerates the transition from cash to digital payments in order to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
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This paper identifies and discusses principles and applications of Blockchain that enhance trust, transparency, and auditability in Social Business (SB) activities. It outlines the challenges related to creating a native cryptocurrency for SB, and barriers to infrastructure and technology adoption by different SB stakeholders.
New IMF paper outlines policy strategies to help promote financial inclusion through fintechs in the Pacific Island countries. It calls on governments to close regulatory gaps and enhance digital and financial literacy while urging fintechs to take a regional approach to overcome scalability constraints.
Women face additional constraints because of their gender that affect their economic performance. New Oxford University Press paper suggests that specific design features - repeated micro-lending, variation in loan terms, private savings accounts, etc - in financial services can yield more positive economic outcomes for women.
Prepared at the request of the G7 French Presidency, this Gates Foundation report aims to be “a blueprint for improving digital financial inclusion in Africa.”
Unregistered SMEs account for 65% of Nigeria’s GDP. Most of them often struggle to demonstrate their personal and business credentials to service providers and customers. This GSMA research finds that there is a need for new approaches to identity and mobile-delivered ‘economic ID’ solution holds promise.
Columbia University paper finds that even when they are given the opportunity, many of India’s poor women opt out of actively engaging with the formal banking institutions. It finds that education is a significant determinant in shaping the financial decisions of India’s poor women.
IFC report aggregates responses from 114 SME banking executives serving more than 17.5 million small businesses.
Low incomes, costs incurred in account ownership, distance from a bank, financial illiteracy and lack of relevant documentation explain low levels of financial inclusion in both India and Africa. In this brief, experts from the Overseas Development Institute discuss what both regions can learn from each other’s efforts to tackle these issues.
Government of Bangladesh shifted to digital payments to transfer education stipends directly to mobile phone accounts of nearly 13 million mothers. In this report, CGDev takes stock of how t…
Why should retailers shift to digital payments? An average digital payments user of Grab, a ride-hailing service, makes twice as many transactions than those who use cash and is 30% more lik…
Technology is shaking up the banking industry and The Economist is taking notice. This week's cover story discusses the potential risks and benefits of the “smartphone revolution in finance”…
Financial Times' special report discusses how the private sector, including Mastercard, and the government are joining forces to promote digital payments in the economy, especially by digiti…
Central Bank of Egypt is promoting women’s financial inclusion through a set of different measures such as enabling the legal and regulatory framework conditions, modernizing the financial i…
This GIZ and Amarante Consulting study shares learnings and challenges with mobile wallet uptake among Syrian refugees, women and unbanked Jordanians.
Over 7.3 million women gained access to financial products from 2012 to 2018 due to policies informed by sex-disaggregated data. Read the CG Dev blog on why robust gender data is crucial for…
This report reveals how the mobile gender gap is changing in low- and middle-income countries, as well as ranking the factors preventing equal mobile ownership and mobile internet use for me…
Ethiopia has a sole mobile network provider and a banking sector that is closed to foreign ownership. Does that make it easy for the government to take a rural-first approach to digitization? Learn about it more in this USAIDFeed The Future brief that also mentions the Alliance.
Through an interpretive case study of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) in Pakistan, this paper critically examines mobile banking usage by women beneficiaries and technology’s effects on the institutional properties of their households.
This study investigates whether strengthening mobile money ecosystems around PNG’s resource regions can improve the distribution of compensation and benefits payments for local communities; Enhance social license for resources companies; and catalyze financial inclusion efforts.
This report lays out the principles for a new digital economy for MENA that embraces innovation and entrepreneurship, youth and women economic empowerment, rekindling the role of State, etc.