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Building Rural Women’s Climate Resilience: Seven Business Drivers Delivering Commercial Value

As climate pressures rise, strengthening rural women’s resilience is critical for their livelihoods and for the long-term viability of the rural businesses that serve them. Through ABERA (Accelerating Business to Empower Rural Women in Agriculture), a CGAP and IDH collaboration, this paper identifies seven practical business drivers that simultaneously strengthen rural women’s climate resilience and business performance.

Responsible Digital Credit: Frontier Solutions for Authorities and Providers

CGAP compiles over 160 global initiatives that address consumer risks in digital credit, from overindebtedness to data misuse. Designed for authorities, providers, and support organizations, this Technical Guide offers a roadmap of solutions to build more customer-centric, risk-conscious and responsible digital credit ecosystems.

Open Finance Self-Assessment Tool and Development Roadmap

This technical guide introduces the open finance self-assessment tool and development roadmap. It provides practical tools for policymakers to use to decide whether to implement an open finance regime to advance financial inclusion and outline a development roadmap to guide the implementation process.

Building Value in Microfinance Through Digitization: Lessons from Loan Automation Pilots

Digitization has brought both hope and frustration to the microfinance industry. To address this, we identified and tested five core principles for successful implementation. This focus note summarizes our experience, evaluates the validity of the five principles, and offers key lessons learned for other industry stakeholders to adopt and scale a similar approach.

Building Value in Microfinance Through Digitization: A Role for Funders

This note highlights the importance of funders in supporting the digital transformation of microfinance institutions (MFIs). The focus is on business intelligence and credit renewal automation to increase the success rate of MFI digitization. Funders play a crucial role in ensuring that MFIs continue to serve the most excluded and underserved customers in the future.

A Technical Guide to Unlock Agent Networks at the Last Mile

This guide outlines five key actions for DFS providers, regulators, and funders to expand rural CICO agent networks based on CGAP's global experience. These actions include building a vision for rural expansion, optimizing investment strategies for rural agents, and capturing the potential of women agents. 

Women Agents for Financial Inclusion: Exploring the Benefits, Constraints, and Potential Solutions

This working paper explores the benefits of having more women agents, the challenges they face, and potential solutions to promote their participation. It highlights that engaging women agents does not compromise performance and offers collaborative solutions for stakeholders to remove barriers and unlock the full potential of women in the DFS ecosystem.

Putting Gig Data to Work: Innovations in Expanding Credit Access

Learn how industry pioneers such as Moove and Karmalife have developed algorithms and products to use work and earnings data to extend credit to gig workers in this new brief.

Financial Services for Gig Workers: Lessons on Getting Design and Delivery Right

This brief highlights four examples of successful design and delivery methods employed by industry leaders in providing financial services to gig workers.

The Setup: Partnerships and Conditions for Offering Financial Services to Gig Workers

Platforms can offer financial services to underserved gig workers through digital channels, but it's essential to have the right environment for payments, regulations, and analysis. In this brief, early lessons share how institutional partnerships can lead to successful market entry.