East asia and pacific

Accelerating the SDGs: How Digital Finance Can Ignite Faster Progress Toward the Global Goals

As world leaders met at the U.N. General Assembly in New York last week, many discussions focused on how to ignite greater progress toward the SDGs.

Uruguay impulsa pagos digitales con incentivos fiscales

El Gobierno de Uruguay albergó a otros países miembro de la Alianza Better Than Cash para compartir sus experiencias en cómo fomentar el uso de los pagos digitales a través de incentivos fiscales.

Saving by Default: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural India

Access to banks is rapidly increasing worldwide, and allows account-based instead of cash transfers. We conduct a randomized experiment documenting the impact of the payment method on saving…

The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food, Vouchers, or Cash Transfers?

With 1.5 billion people covered globally, food and voucher programs provide an important lifeline for the poor and vulnerable. The study – The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food, Vouchers or …

Building the capacity of public health programmes to become data rich, information rich and action rich

Good quality, timely data are the cornerstone of health systems, but in many countries these data are not used for evidence-informed decision making and/or for improving public health. The S…

Bridging the Digital Divide and Supporting Increased Digital Trade: Scoping Study

The global economy is experiencing important technological shifts, with the rise of digital technology a key driver. This can be seen today in the rapid growth of the digital economy, broadl…

Branchless banking: Evaluating the doorstep delivery of financial services in rural India

This paper evaluates the effect on household savings of India’s recent financial inclusion drive, a drive that generated an unprecedented increase in access to financial institutions by usin…

Blockchain for humanitarian action and development aid

Blockchain technology is swiftly entering the fields of humanitarian and development aid. While it has the potential to revolutionize the aid sector, e.g., through pairing smart contracts wi…

Sierra Leone: Digitizing revenue collection is the next frontier

By Alfred Akibo-Betts and Tenzin Keyzom Massally

G20 endorses the Alliance’s guidance note

G20 finance ministers call for open and inclusive digital payments infrastructures

Unlocking digital for Bharat: 50 Billion opportunity

This research focused on developing insights on understanding key user barriers and interventions required across various stages of the user journey …

Achieving Development and Acceptance of an Open and Inclusive Digital Payments Infrastructure

A report by the Better Than Cash Alliance for the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion.

How we banked a billion people and what to do next

Ethiopia: “Mobile money doubled my number of customers in just three years”

In Addis Ababa, the vibrant Ethiopian capital, lies a busy Somali community market where Bisharo runs a small shop.

Young women key to digital payments adoption

With 180 million unbanked people, Indonesia is one of the most valuable untapped digital payments markets in the Asia Pacific region. According to a Think with Google paper, women aged 25-34 will be the key to enabling adoption in the country.

Mejor que el efectivo

Prerequisites to digitizing the agricultural last mile

Distribution 2.0: The future of mobile money agent distribution networks

In December 2017, there were over 2.9 million active agents and 690 million registered customer accounts worldwide. Primarily responsible for registering customer accounts, mobile money agen…

Lessons from Rwanda: Harnessing public-private partnerships to drive payment digitization

By Oswell Kahonde and Juan Blanco