Research & Analysis

Regulating Financial Innovation: What Does It Take?

This working paper introduces vision-guided regulation as an approach that helps financial sector regulators harness innovation for inclusive finance.

Pathways to Financial Inclusion for Young Women: Opportunities for Financial Service Providers and Funders

Based on research in Ghana and Tanzania, this Focus Note presents key opportunities for FSPs and funders to meet the real financial needs of young women aged 15-24.

Safeguarding Financial Inclusion During Crises: Lessons for Policymaking

This paper offers guidance to financial safety-net authorities on designing crisis response measures that both restore financial stability and safeguard financial inclusion.

Competition for Financial Inclusion: A Conceptual Framework

The insights in this paper point to the importance of financial authorities applying an intentional competition lens and offer an analytical framework to help deliver more inclusive and resilient financial systems.

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.

From Safety Net to Springboard

As climate risks intensify, there is an urgent need to better support low-income communities to adapt and build resilience. This paper highlights an untapped opportunity hiding in plain sight - integrating financial services into social protection programs – and outlines five priorities for funders, policymakers, and social protection professionals to unlock its potential.

From Insights to Interventions: Addressing Gender Norms in Women’s Financial Inclusion

CGAP’s Design Guide introduces a structured, field-tested approach to uncover how gender norms shape market actor behavior, to help development actors move beyond symptoms to address the root causes of women’s financial exclusion.

Diagnosing Gender Norms in the Financial Market System: A Practical Guide

CGAP’s Diagnostic Guide helps development actors move beyond symptoms to address the root causes of women’s financial exclusion. This guide introduces a structured, field-tested approach to uncover how gender norms shape market actor behavior and offers practitioners a powerful set of tools for examining norms-driven constraints and identifying high impact intervention points.

Enhancing Food Security through Finance-Enabled Food Systems Transformation

This working paper examines how inclusive finance can address today's evolving food security challenges by unlocking targeted investments in high-impact agricultural value chains that best promote nutritional, sustainability, and livelihood outcomes through agricultural technology (AgTech) adoption.

Invisible Barriers: How Gender Norms Impact Financial Inclusion

Gender norms shape the behavior of financial service providers, regulators, and communities, often limiting women’s access to and use of financial services. This Focus Note presents a practical framework, based on diagnostics in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, that classifies gender norms by their strength and prevalence and proposes tailored strategies for addressing them.