Legal & Regulatory Reform for Access to Finance: A Policy & Programming Tool

This toolkit, The Policy and Programming Tool for Legal and Regulatory Frameworks for Access to Finance (LRFAF), is designed to assist the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) staff, other donors and stakeholders to identify the conditions under which legal and regulatory reform might be warranted, and to suggest various programmatic options.

The paper outlines the following three processes in the toolkit:

• Assessing the existing situation for financial services, which includes:
  • Documenting the financial services market;
  • Looking at the ways the poor already access credit, savings and transfer services.

• Analyzing the conditions for reform, which includes gathering information on:
  • Characteristics of the financial regulatory framework;
  • Capacity of the financial regulator;
  • Existence of a public advocate for access to finance;
  • Opportunity for USAID to effect change.
• Determining the possible policy and programming options, which includes:
  • Making a decision roadmap that helps users to see what types of interventions may be needed for an optimal project;
  • Offering, as examples, case studies of countries that have faced comparable situations.

The toolkit also provides:

• References of useful documents;
• A list of selected USAID projects with a LRFAF component.