Recent Blogs

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Why Don’t Fintechs Have a Larger Share of Peru’s MSE Credit Market?

CGAP market sizing research in Peru found that fintechs are only responsible for 0.3% of the MSE credit market. Here, we ask why fintechs have such a small segment of the MSE credit market and posit how that share can be increased.
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Peruvian Authorities Pilot Tool to Improve Consumer Listening

CGAP and Accenture LLP (Accenture) launched a pilot to help Peruvian authorities assess their consumer listening mechanisms and determine the necessary steps to design an integrated financial consumer protection platform.
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How Peru Is Elevating the Collective Consumer Voice

The steps Peru has taken to ensure consumers have a strong voice in financial consumer protection regulation may be instructive for other countries working to protect vulnerable consumers.
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Graduation Case Studies: An Opportunity to Learn & Scale Up

To further understand the opportunities and challenges faced by governments in the implementation of a Graduation Approach, the Ford Foundation has commissioned three case studies to examine the planning and execution of Graduation programs launched by the governments of Colombia, Peru and Ethiopia.
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Cashless & Cashy: The Yin-Yang of Digital Delivery in Peru

When it comes to delivering financial services to lower income segments in Peru, innovators have struck an interesting balance between cashless and cashy transactions.
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Five Lessons about Agent Networks in Peru

CGAP recently completed a study of five agent networks in Peru comprising more than 26,000 agents and 24 million monthly transactions to identify key success factors in reaching poor and rural areas.
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Regulation and Innovation: Hand in Hand?

The United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority just launched a new approach to dealing with the natural tension between consumer protection, innovation, and ensuring financial inclusion. Project Innovate is the UK's answer to supporting innovation where it could genuinely improve the lives of consumers.
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Can Agents Improve Conditional Cash Transfers in Peru?

Innovations for Poverty Action is working with the Peruvian Government to test conditional cash transfer programs that help poor people save more and receive their payments in more convenient ways.
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Improving the Lives of the Poorest in Peru

CGAP staff document a field visit to the Peru Graduation Pilot, where several communities outside of Cusco are participating in a project to understand how safety nets, livelihoods and access to finance can help the poorest graduate from extreme poverty.
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Voices from the Field: Reaching the Poorest in Peru

CGAP's Michael Rizzo was in Peru and spoke with some of the pioneers and partners that have witnessed the Graduation Program evolve over the last few years.
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Social Inclusion Cannot be Achieved Without Financial Inclusion

A view from Peru on how financial inclusion sits at the intersection between social and economic development.
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A New Wave of E-Money in Latin America

In Latin America, the banking sector is highly rooted in the economy, and to think about non-bank issued electronic money is almost heretic. But things are changing.
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Can Retailers and MNOs Provide More Efficient Financial Services?

When it comes to financial inclusion, retail has been one of the late driving forces in Latin America. In the past, banks have been unable to cater to over 50% percent of households in the region. Retailers have filled some of this gap and have started offering formal financial services to millions of previously unbanked customers.
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Creative Partnerships Promote Rural Credit in the Andes

The competitiveness and sizable growth of microlending in the Andean Region can be largely attributed to the favorable regulatory framework, but the creativity of the stakeholders in the industry has been an important factor as well. The supervisory authorities in the region’s financial sector have recognized the importance of microlending in the promotion of financial inclusion and have gradually created an environment that has been open to creativity and has enabled the different players to come up with financial services for previously underserved populations in rural areas.
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How to Save Lives and Lower Fuel Consumption: Clean Cookstoves

Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly 3 billion people in the developing world – causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and children the most affected.
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Broadening the Financial Inclusion Cast of Characters

New technology-enabled models for financial inclusion seek to take transactions outside of bank branches and into retail shops that exist in every community where poor people live and work.
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Social Protection and Financial Inclusion

The 2010 Global Expert Colloquium on Savings and CCTs was co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Citi, UNDP, New America Foundation and Proyecto Capital.
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Virtual Conference: Getting Past the Technology Hurdles at MFIs

Over the past several months, CGAP and Grameen Foundation, with support from the MasterCard Foundation and the EU/ACP Microfinance Programme, hosted a series of four workshops to discuss the back office challenges at MFIs. Workshops took place in Washington, DC, Kenya, India, and Peru in an attempt to understand the issues at both a global and regional level.