CGAP Digital Rails
CGAP’s three-year project on Digital Financial Services (DFS) Distribution Networks seeks to enable key stakeholders in six focus countries (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire, Colombia) to leverage current knowledge about Cash-in and Cash-out (CICO) networks in rural areas, where most of the financially excluded people still live, with a view to enabling more rural customers to access and use digital financial services. Lessons from the work in focus countries during the project will be shared with a global audience to inform the global financial inclusion agenda.
The DFS Distribution Networks project is built around four key components. These components work together to advocate and drive the CICO agenda at the country and global levels, and include: (i) Driving In-Country Impact, to support local stakeholders to further develop and implement their strategies for CICO network expansion; (ii) CICO Bootcamps to introduce global lessons and facilitate consensus among key local stakeholders on how to address constraints in each country context; (iii) Global Hub of CICO Knowledge, to synthesize lessons from country processes supported and shares them with other countries; and (iv) gender analysis to identify country-specific gender constraints in CICO networks, improve understanding of how CICO can enable women’s financial inclusion, agency and control over resources, and generate lessons on how to remove these gender constraints based on evidence gathered.
Kore Global is providing technical advice to ensure adequate and up-to-date gender knowledge is embedded in the project’s cross-cutting gender analysis component. Building on work done to date by the CGAP team, we are utilising three key steps to apply a gender lens to CICO network development:
Understand and analyse women’s financial services needs and the broader contexts (barriers and enablers) in which they live. This will be done through utilising a gender analytical framework that seeks to understand the individual (capability), meso (normative) and macro (structural) factors that are mediating different women’s access to and use of CICO networks, both as agents and customers.
Using the above analysis, identify the ways in which different women are being excluded from existing CICO networks. This will require an understanding of existing supply (by type of provider and product) and for each segment; their experiences, views and preferences on these. Identify the opportunities for greater inclusion.
Develop and test solutions to increasing women’s access to and use of financial services. These solutions will be tested based on a set of criteria that will be developed together with the CGAP team, for example identifying where solutions fall along the gender continuum (from gender unaware, to gender aware, to gender sensitive to gender transformative), and/or using pathways of change hypotheses.
Work is ongoing, but our early insights have been shared in two blogs - on the materiality of agent gender for customers and on the performance of women vs men agents in CICO networks - on FinDev Gateway.
Photo credit: Nicolas Remene via Communication for Development Ltd
