Whether it is digital payments, resilience for MSMEs or financial integrity, much of our work is underpinned by the desire to create more inclusive financial systems and services. Cenfri has successfully implemented several multi-year financial inclusion programmes:
Making Access to Financial Services Possible or MAP (in partnership with UNCDF and FinMark Trust)
insight2impact or i2i (in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mastercard Foundation)
Risk, Remittances and Integrity or RRI (with FSD Africa)
Remittance Access Initiative (with IFAD’s Financing Facility for Remittances)
Our view is that while financial inclusion targets (such as the percentage of adults with a bank account) are valid, they don’t tell you much when tracked in isolation. It is important to understand whether people use their financial services, and if so, whether this enables them to meet their needs. We have developed six financial inclusion measurement frameworks that outline this expanded understanding of financial inclusion.
“Are we there yet?” It’s a familiar refrain to any parent who has taken a child on a long journey – you may even remember the stock replies your own parents supplied in similar situations. But “we’ll be there soon” probably didn’t correspond with your own perception of time, and
How do Mexicans solve their financial needs? This report outlines the findings from a study carried out by insight2impact in collaboration with Comision Nacional Bancaria y de Valores (CNBV) of Mexico to gauge how Mexicans meet their financial needs, especially when it comes to send and receive money, manage liquidity,
The shortage of data science skills is a major challenge for Africa. With relatively few local educational institutions offering dedicated data science degrees, the small contingent of existing Africa-based data scientists tend to have varied backgrounds – and they often acquire their data science skills by piecing together a range
It’s not easy delivering data-driven financial services to the financially excluded in Africa’s emerging economies. That’s why technical assistance (TA) can be essential to the success of the region’s financial service providers (FSPs). Comprised of various forms of non-financial assistance provided by outside specialists, TA can take the form of
Despite the increasing availability of data and a growing appreciation for the importance of data-driven product design, there is a practical disconnect between the decisions being made for financial inclusion in Africa and the available data. This gap hinders the extent to which financial products and services meet the needs
Transactional data can potentially augment the more traditional demand-and-supply data used to monitor use-based financial inclusion indicators. We recently worked with Nigeria’s central switch, the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System (NIBSS), to explore customer-level transactional data. NIBSS processes all inter-bank credit and debit transactions as well as all point-of-sale (POS) transactions in
Exploring Africa’s digital-platform economy and financial services The digital-platform economy and its potentially disruptive qualities have been a source of excitement and anxiety globally. In the African context, this debate has taken place largely in the absence of information on the size and nature of platform players. This focus note
DataHack4FI country winner discovering the prospect of using financial management and accounting systems to generate credit scores Almost half the micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Zambia – comprising approximately 80% [1] of Zambia’s private-sector businesses – perceive the lack of access to credit as a significant hurdle to their
Targeting small businesses with personalised business advice and predicting successful loan applications Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) play a key role in economic development, but they face challenges in accessing finance. This case study explores a Tanzanian initiative that aims to support MSMEs – particularly those owned by women and youth –
Against the backdrop of the financial sector playing a key role in mobilising resources to achieve economic growth, Zimbabwe has in recent times seen severe macroeconomic constraints and hardship. Over the past two decades, the country’s financial sector has learnt (or not learnt) a number of lessons – lessons that
“Are we there yet?” It’s a familiar refrain to any parent who has taken a child on a long journey – you may even remember the stock replies your own parents supplied in similar situations. But “we’ll be there soon” probably didn’t correspond with your own perception of time, and
How do Mexicans solve their financial needs? This report outlines the findings from a study carried out by insight2impact in collaboration with Comision Nacional Bancaria y de Valores (CNBV) of Mexico to gauge how Mexicans meet their financial needs, especially when it comes to send and receive money, manage liquidity,
The shortage of data science skills is a major challenge for Africa. With relatively few local educational institutions offering dedicated data science degrees, the small contingent of existing Africa-based data scientists tend to have varied backgrounds – and they often acquire their data science skills by piecing together a range
It’s not easy delivering data-driven financial services to the financially excluded in Africa’s emerging economies. That’s why technical assistance (TA) can be essential to the success of the region’s financial service providers (FSPs). Comprised of various forms of non-financial assistance provided by outside specialists, TA can take the form of
Despite the increasing availability of data and a growing appreciation for the importance of data-driven product design, there is a practical disconnect between the decisions being made for financial inclusion in Africa and the available data. This gap hinders the extent to which financial products and services meet the needs
Transactional data can potentially augment the more traditional demand-and-supply data used to monitor use-based financial inclusion indicators. We recently worked with Nigeria’s central switch, the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System (NIBSS), to explore customer-level transactional data. NIBSS processes all inter-bank credit and debit transactions as well as all point-of-sale (POS) transactions in
Exploring Africa’s digital-platform economy and financial services The digital-platform economy and its potentially disruptive qualities have been a source of excitement and anxiety globally. In the African context, this debate has taken place largely in the absence of information on the size and nature of platform players. This focus note
DataHack4FI country winner discovering the prospect of using financial management and accounting systems to generate credit scores Almost half the micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Zambia – comprising approximately 80% [1] of Zambia’s private-sector businesses – perceive the lack of access to credit as a significant hurdle to their
Targeting small businesses with personalised business advice and predicting successful loan applications Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) play a key role in economic development, but they face challenges in accessing finance. This case study explores a Tanzanian initiative that aims to support MSMEs – particularly those owned by women and youth –
Against the backdrop of the financial sector playing a key role in mobilising resources to achieve economic growth, Zimbabwe has in recent times seen severe macroeconomic constraints and hardship. Over the past two decades, the country’s financial sector has learnt (or not learnt) a number of lessons – lessons that
