New & Noteworthy

Developed by the EIU in collaboration with the Multilateral Investment Fund (a member of the Inter- American Development Bank Group) and CAF—Development Bank of Latin America, and with additional financial and technical support from the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion and the MetLife Foundation, the Microscope benchmarks national progress on financial inclusion in 55 countries in order to catalyse reform. Read this year's report and see all the country rankings.

Throughout FI2020 Week, November 2-6, over 25 partners across the globe will convene conversations exploring the most important steps to achieving financial inclusion. FI2020 Week will bring together diverse stakeholders to conduct interactive and participatory events, each of which will produce calls to action. Along with in-person events, online webinars will be held throughout the week. For more information, including how to participate and get involved, check out the FI2020 Week website here. And follow along with the latest happenings using the Storify social media feed on the FI2020 Week website, and with #FI2020 on Twitter.

In the new FI2020 Progress Report, we present our assessment of progress toward global financial inclusion through the lens of five topics: Addressing Customer Needs, Client Protection, Credit Reporting & Data, Financial Capability, and Technology. The report provides a qualitative and interactive assessment of who is doing what, celebrating the most significant accomplishments, and highlighting the gaps that constitute the agenda for the coming years. We’ve started each topic of conversation with a scorecard between 0 and 10. We invite you to use the interactive feature on the website to cast your own vote and compare your scores to ours. Click here to visit the Progress Report website.

Are you a senior leader at a financial institution serving lower-income clients in sub-Saharan Africa? The Africa Board Fellowship (ABF) program might be for you! The six-month program was launched late last year to foster peer-to-peer learning and exchange on governance practices among board members and CEOs at African microfinance institutions. The fellowship begins and ends with multi-day in-person seminars; in between seminars, fellows are connected through a virtual collaboration space that includes discussion forums and dialogues. For more information on the Africa Board Fellowship, including details on how to apply, click here.

A couple months ago we announced a new program coming out of CFI and Accion designed to produce actionable research for the microfinance and financial inclusion industry. We’ve been busy since, overwhelmed by the positive response we had to our announcement, and torn between many high-quality research proposals. In recent days we selected four fellows to carry out research that we think will have an influence on the future of financial inclusion: Guy Stuart, Leon Perlman, Christy Stickney, and Amy Jensen Mowl. Learn about their research projects, here.

Will microfinance continue to be relevant in 2020 and beyond? Should regulators or the industry lead on client protection? Will data analytics replace traditional credit reporting systems? A new Financial Inclusion 2020 e-magazine explores these three essential questions debate-style, tapping industry leaders from around the world to weigh in with their perspectives. Among the debaters are Alok Prasad, Principal Advisor of RBL Bank, Dean Karlan, President of Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Accion Venture Lab team. To read the magazine, click here.

“Nearly every industry requires infrastructure to thrive, and this goes for the microfinance industry too," a new CFI report asserts. The result of a myriad of partner efforts, the report investigates three main microfinance information infrastructure elements with the aim of helping industry stakeholders understand the business models of the information providers and allow the stakeholders to identify actions that might improve the sustainability of the information infrastructure. This report summarizes the findings of the study and puts forward action recommendations for consideration. To read the report, click here.

Today the Microfinance CEO Working Group (MCWG) announced their new Co-Chair, Lauren Hendricks, Executive Director of CARE’s Access Africa program, who joins current Co-Chair Alex Counts, Founder of Grameen Foundation. The two will lead the Working Group’s continued efforts to promote responsible microfinance, so the field can reach its full potential of bringing financial and related services to those who have been traditionally excluded. The CFI is the secretariat of the Working Group. For more information on this news, and on the MCWG, click here.

Today we’re kicking off a brand new Fellows program to explore some of the most important and critical questions facing the financial inclusion industry. This year we’ll be empowering four researchers to investigate the topics of: conditions for “on-ramps” to lead to deeper inclusion; impact of ubiquitous Internet access on the business models for financial inclusion; clients that grow from microenterprise to small business; cost savings from technology in microfinance delivery. For more information and to apply, click here.

The release of new financial inclusion products, partnerships, publications, and policies is a constant. To make sense of this fast-changing landscape, CFI’s Financial Inclusion 2020 project is combing the world for the latest inclusion insights, trends, and developments. Each week the FI2020 team will bring you the big news in financial inclusion in an online magazine, the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed. We’ll pull from all over to spotlight great new stories, initiatives, videos, podcasts, and more. To check out the first edition, click here, and make sure to subscribe so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.