January 2021

21Jan

Digital finance and inclusion in the time of COVID-19

By Niclas Benni The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in severe and protracted disruptions to the livelihoods of people all around the world, both in developing and developed countries. The pervasive effects of this pandemic, which have ended up affecting every aspect of our societies, keep unfolding as the crisis progresses, leaving profound marks on people’s livelihoods and countries’ economies that are expected to last for many years after the pandemic has ended. As part of the global response to...

January 21, 2021
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21Jan

Global Payments: And the Fintech Innovations Changing the Industry

By Carol Coye Benson Glenbrook’s “Global Payments” provides the go-to-answers to the big questions about global payments. In clear and lively writing, the author explains the common model behind national payments systems all over the world, what actually happens in a cross-border payment, and how fintech innovators are changing the industry. The book describes payments innovations in the rails, in the products and services, and new out-of-the-box alternatives. It explores real-time retail payments (aka Faster Payments) and how these...

January 21, 2021
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December 2020

17Dec

WhatsApp to roll out health insurance and micro-pension products in India

The Facebook-owned company is currently allowed to extend its payment service to a maximum of 20 million users for peer-to-peer transactions. Read also Chile’s Great Pension Raid A month and a half after receiving regulatory approval from the National Payment Council of India (NPCI) to roll out payments on its messaging platform, WhatsApp has unveiled plans to offer financial services like health insurance and micro-pension products in India. Read also Malta. Three in ten pensioners at risk of poverty The American...

December 17, 2020
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03Dec

Financial Circuit

By Dr. Anurag Kumar Jha This book is a kind of roadmap which shows the path of financial inclusion. Although several works have been done on the present topic but its uniqueness lies on the fact that it connects digital India to become Atma Nirbhar Bharat. It is a kind of journey where every kind of people either rich or poor can be located digitally and financially. How individual and businesses have access to useful and affordable financial product...

December 3, 2020
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03Dec

Long-Term Effects of the Targeting the Ultra Poor Program

By Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Garima Sharma This paper studies the long-run effects of a “big-push” program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over 10 years, we find positive effects on consumption (1 SD), food security (0.1 SD), income (0.3 SD), and health (0.2 SD). These effects grow for the first seven years following the transfer and persist until year 10, consistent with the alleviation...

December 3, 2020
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03Dec

Ghana: Pres Launches Cocoa Farmers Pension Scheme

A cocoa farmers pension scheme for farmers was yesterday launched here by the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. In pursuit of Section 26 of the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) Law, 1984 (PNDC L.81), which mandates COCOBOD to establish a contributory insurance for cocoa farmers, the government, in collaboration with COCOBOD and the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA), set up the scheme. It is open to all cocoa farmers in the country to make contributions toward their retirement while COCOBOD makes...

December 3, 2020
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November 2020

27Nov

Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa

By Roberta Gatti, Diego F Angel-Urdinola, Joana Silva, András Bodor While economic growth has been sustained for a number of years in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, this has not resulted in the creation of an adequate number of jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs. While there is a great deal of heterogeneity across countries, informality in MENA is widespread, and some countries in the region are...

November 27, 2020
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27Nov

Fintechs and Financial Inclusion. Looking past the hype and exploring their potential

By Gayatri Murthy, Maria Fernandez-Vidal, Xavier Faz, and Ruben Barreto (CGAP) Fintech companies combine technology with access to data to deliver new financial services and experiences to customers. They have been proliferating in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), and some are creating solutions specifically for underserved, low-income, or remote customers. Yet for all the general excitement that fintechs have generated in the global development community, there is little information available about how specific fintech innovations solve pain points in...

November 27, 2020
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05Nov

The Future of Work in Latin America and the Caribbean: How Can Technology Facilitate Job Recovery after COVID-19?

By Azuara Herrera, Oliver; Fazio, Maria Victoria; Hand, Anne; Keller, Lukas; Rodríguez Tapia, Catalina; Silva Porto, María Teresa COVID-19 has been a catalyst for three technologies that had had slow adoption rates until just a few months ago: teleworking, on-demand digital platforms, and online training. This is evidenced by the increase in downloads of mobile applications related to these activities. In this interactive note, the sixth in the series The Future of Work in Latin America and the Caribbean,...

November 5, 2020
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September 2020

24Sep

Digital financial services for smallholder households

By IFAD Recent advances in technology and telecommunications have the potential to make financial services more accessible and affordable for smallholder households in rural areas. With digital platforms such as mobile phones, smallholders can now use financial services without having to visit a bank branch. The number of digital financial services (DFS) is increasing, including smallholder- specific ones, as well as the number of countries in which services are available. However, there are still many barriers to uptake and...

September 24, 2020
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