Moving Beyond Access to Finance

KIT Royal Tropical Institute

Moving Beyond Access to Finance

What is Financial Inclusion?

Financial inclusion is a key enabler in development. It supports people’s economic empowerment and helps them to better manage their business and their lives. Financial inclusion is the process of ensuring access to and usage of appropriate products and services for all. Products and services should be available at an affordable cost, in a fair and transparent manner, and offered by mainstream institutional players.

Moving beyond access to finance Financial inclusion is more than just access to finance. Every financial product lives in an ecosystem where inequalities influence whether different groups of people – including women – can benefit from it. People may end up with very different opportunities, even if they have the same access to finance. Our approach to financial inclusion seeks to transform these underlying inequalities.

We aim to generate sustainable impacts in both the lives of people and the financial performance of the service provider. To do so, we place equal emphasis on grounding financial services and investments in a sound business case and providing an in-depth understanding of the specific needs and preferences of different customer segments. Our customer-centric approach allows us to find solutions that address these specific needs and preferences through financial, non-financial and digital services.

Our work emphasises the marginalised To promote financial inclusion, KIT supports development finance institutions, commercial banks, funds, and impact investors in the public and private sector to shape their offerings and value proposition for marginalised market segments. Our work emphasises women, youth, migrants, rural farmers, and micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises. We draw on our deep knowledge base of these customer segments to deepen our clients’ understanding of both demand- and supply-side market dynamics and design and implement inclusive financial products, services and policies.

Our Services We offer a wide array of services, including:

Research

→ Market study (supply & demand) → Impact evaluation → Thought leadership

Strategy

→ Market segmentation → Customer value proposition → Landscape & partnerships review

Training

→ Gender sensitivity training → Gender awareness training → Leadership trajectories

Technical assistance

→ Linkages of informal services to formal financial services → Financial services in value chains

Gender-lens investment

→ Gender action plans → Technical assistance service design

Our work contributes to the SDGs:

Supporting Access Bank to be the Bank of Choice for Women In 2019, KIT’s financial inclusion team joined hands with Palladium to help Access Bank with an ambitious goal: to become the bank of choice for women in Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda and Zambia. A primary aim was to furnish the W Initiative – the bank’s primary vehicle to engage with and serve women – with more insight into the unique dynamics of the women’s market.

To respond to these needs, KIT adopted a dual approach to building the bank’s capacity to serve women – one which placed equal emphasis on the demandand supply-side of the equation. For example, through in-depth interviews and research, KIT helped Access Bank to better understand the financial and non-financial needs of these customers, with a particular emphasis on women entrepreneurs, young female professionals, and professionally qualified, affluent women.

This research also provided a comprehensive picture of the relevant non-financial services and digital financial services providers, with a view to identifying potential strategic partners to help the bank to increase its outreach to women.

Coupled with training of frontline staff and strategic recommendations, this information is helping Access Bank to hone its business offering based on evidence and build its capacity to respond to the unique dynamics of the women’s marketplace. Moreover, supported by a new framework designed by KIT, the bank will be better equipped to collect and analyse data that generates new insights into the financial performance and impact of the W Initiative.

Gender Lens Investing with the Austrian Development Bank As an intermediary in development finance, the Austrian Development Bank (OeEB) recognises that it is well-positioned to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. It is a priority, because investing in gender equality is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do. But what is the best way to holistically integrate gender into its investment process and workplace?

And how can it do this in a way that also influences its clients and investment partners to make smart investments that simultaneously benefit and empower women and girls? Backed by KIT’s deep experience in ‘gender lens’ investing, our financial inclusion team supported OeEB to get to the bottom of these questions.

Beginning in 2019, KIT worked with OeEB to forge a 5-year Gender Action Plan, a roadmap of key steps and targets for better integrating gender into the bank’s investment processes across different sectors and portfolios. The partnership produced a comprehensive service line for gender-smart finance, designed to support OeEB’s partners and clients to incorporate a ‘gender lens’ into their own investment strategies. These services offer participating institutions a range of technical assistance to help them advance their own gender journey: from research and strategy to training and gender-smart financial product and service design.

The KIT-OeEB collaboration also produced a ‘gender marker’ to help OeEB reflect on how its financial institution investments reach and impact women.

KIT also researched gendered risks and opportunities within manufacturing, renewable energy and infrastructure projects and helped OeEB to incorporate a gender lens into its environmental and social due diligence process for its investments in this sector.

Sea of Change: Financial Inclusion in Indonesian Fishing Communities Fish and aquaculture are a major source of food and income for millions of people in Indonesia’s coastal communities. But these small-scale fisheries are largely underfinanced, depriving households and small businesses of the financial tools and strategies that would otherwise help them to maximise the benefits from their fishing activities and bolster their economic and social resilience. As part of the Sea of Change project, KIT is working with Rare to extend inclusive finance to more than 5,000 fishing households in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province.

Financed by the Dutch Postcode Loterij, Sea of Change focuses on increasing the visibility of women’s roles in fisheries, and empowering women to have a greater voice in community-based fisheries management and decision-making. It also aims to strengthen the social and economic resilience of men and women fishers, while at the same time building long-term incentives to use and manage coastal fishing areas sustainably.

To support Sea of Change – and its parent programme, Fish Forever – KIT developed a gender strategy to ensure gender-equitable outcomes are achieved in a meaningful, effective and feasible manner. As part of this strategy, KIT examined ways to ease fishing households’ access to finance and extend their traditionally short-term financial planning to longer-term planning, which will help to align conservation and community development needs. Sea of Change will serve as a model for the region in effectively connecting poverty alleviation with community-based natural resource management, while linking gender equity to improved environmental outcomes.

Our Experts

Anne Rappoldt a.rappoldt@kit.nl

Maureen Kwilasa m.kwilasa@kit.nl

Fiona Jarden f.jarden@kit.nl

Laura Geurs l.geurs@kit.nl

KIT has a strong network of local consultants and associates to supplement our core team

Contact KIT Royal Tropical Institute Mauritskade 64 1092 AD Amsterdam The Netherlands

Follow us on social media @100KIT KIT Royal Tropical Institute KIT Royal Tropical Institute For more information visit: www.kit.nl/financial-inclusion