FinEquity's June 2021 Newsletter

Dear FinEquity Members, 
 

Last Summer, our Community embarked on a three-week e-discussion on Digital Financial Literacy (DFL), a dynamic interaction where dozens of you discussed its enablers and constraints. This month, we’re delighted to present the synthesis of this discussion, a community effort through and through. Our brief summarizes demand-side challenges, offers supply-side recommendations, and includes many of the critical resources that you shared over the discussion. 
 

We know there is much more important work happening in the DFL space and we would love to hear about it. Please let us know about your work on our DGroups platform. You, as members, are the backbone of this community and this synthesis is just one of many crucial resources that you have made possible.

Wishing everyone a healthy June. 

Katie and the FinEquity team. 

Pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) solar financing has electrified the homes of more than 100 million people and transformed many households that aren’t connected to the electrical grid. CGAP’s theory of change suggests that PAYGo solar can be an inclusive business model which improves access to energy and finance in ways that can likely benefit women. 

In this webinar, providers and experts from CGAP, GOGLA, ENGIE, Solar Sister, Strategic Impact Advisors, and J-PAL will discuss existing knowledge gaps, implications for future research, as well as the design and delivery of PAYGo solar.

Join us on June 15, 2021, at 9:00 am EDT.

Visit our website to register. 

The last decade of DFS has demonstrated how complex and nuanced women’s wants and needs are when it comes to their financial lives. While we have seen enormous growth, there has only been one mPesa; this success has not been easily replicated in other contexts. Despite a growing understanding of the many factors that influence a women’s access and usage of DFS, there often remains a tendency to copy and paste existing products and services, rather than design for a specific audience. 

Digitally Enabled Financial Inclusion's (DEFI) second sub-theme is centered on design. A crucial component of any DFS deployment, good design understands and responds to the challenges in women’s lives. 

We want to feature your work in FinEquity’s next publication!

Where have you seen good design play out in your work with women and DFS? We are looking to build a series of case studies that highlight different ways that design has been employed across the customer journey. If you would like your work to be considered in the series, please share your contributions via email at chighet@worldbank.org or visit our DGroups platform before Friday, June 18, 2021.

In September 2020, the WEE-DiFine initiative was launched with the publication of the Initiative’s white paper, which aimed to identify gaps in the study of the causal mechanisms between access to digital financial services (DFS) and women’s economic empowerment (WEE). 

While there is a clear and immediate need for more rigorous evaluations on the impact of DFS and WEE, this post presents five reasons — and five ways — to utilize qualitative work to explore this subject area.