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 focus note reviews early lessons for NGOs from the field. It explores three central questions: Does initial evidence support the notion that mobile money is a cheaper, faster, and more …
The largest social program in Mexico, Oportunidades, distributes benefits to 6.5 million people. The government-owned Bank of National Savings and Financial Services (Bansefi) was looking fo…
Conditional and unconditional cash transfers have been effective in improving development outcomes in a variety of contexts, yet the costs of these programs to program recipients and impleme…
Ghana has made significant gains, including almost 100 percent government payments to people and payments within the government now processed digitally.
Mexico’s route to financial inclusion begins with commitment to reduce use of cash
Good news ahead of the World Humanitarian Summit
The Government of India has joined the UN-based Better Than Cash Alliance in an extension of the Indian Government’s commitment to reduce cash in its economy.
Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest baking company, announced that it will strengthen its commitment to digitize traditional small shops in Mexico.
During President Barack Obama’s current visit to Africa, the Government of Malawi announced its commitment to the Better Than Cash Alliance.
This paper investigates the impact of mobile financial services - MFS (mobile money, and mobile credit and savings) on the informal sector using data from 101 emerging and developing countries over the period 2000-15.
This paper explores economic informality and how it relates to digital financial inclusion. It focuses specifically on the potential role that digital financial services–including those accessed through mobile phones and the internet can play in encouraging businesses to formalize their operations.
The latest Financial Access 2019 survey shows that around 83% of Kenyans now have a formal account. Cost remains the main barrier for uptake. More Kenyans now save on their mobile phones (54%) than informally.
Does access to mobile money help improve livelihood in remote settings? This paper shows that rolling out mobile money agents in Northern Uganda led to cost-savings for remittance transactions. It also shows that access to digital payments doubled the nonfarm self-employment rate and reduced the fraction of households with very low food security.
World Bank joined hands with IFC on a project for digitizing and modernizing Côte d’Ivoire’s social protection payments. Results show a reduction in administrative costs and better targeting of beneficiaries.
Water providers are shifting to digital payments to reduce expenses and streamline delivery. In this report, CGAP and GSMA share lessons learned from 25 organizations, including the challeng…
As Nigeria rolls out one of the developing world’s most ambitious policy platforms to boost digital payments and drive greater financial inclusion, it’s important to take stock of the country’s progress to date, so that policy-makers around the world can learn from Nigeria’s experiences.
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…
L'expérience de la Sierra Leone montre qu'il est crucial de se préparer tôt aux paiements numériques avant l'émergence d'une crise.
The paper covers in-depth analyses of how digitizing P2G payments help drive the financial inclusion of poor consumers and identifies some critical factors to develop an efficient and inclusive payment system.
This report provides insights from the Digital Money Index, which tracks the development of digital money readiness in 84 countries. It shows a 5.5% improvement in overall digital money readiness over the last five years.