What I’m Grateful For
On Thursday, families across the United States will sit down together for Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday, and not just for the food. It’s a special moment that allows us to reflect on the things we’re grateful for and express our gratitude.
One of the things I’m most grateful for is the people, institutions, and partnerships that supported Accion over the last year. The work that we do alongside our partners allows us to help farmers improve their resilience, help parents pay for their children’s education, and build a world with more opportunities for everyone. From providing better crop yields to promoting economic growth to helping women gain autonomy, financial inclusion enables the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and creates a safer, more equitable world.
With your support, Accion has continued to work toward making full financial inclusion a reality. Together, we welcomed new leaders, created new partnerships and continued demonstrating how inclusive financial services can catalyze progress. In 2019, we:
- Worked with Apollo Agriculture to teach smallholder farmers across Kenya the best ways to use new fertilizers, plant their seeds, and use financing to grow larger crops.
- Expanded Accion Venture Lab’s work harnessing emerging fintech innovations to help people manage their daily lives, navigate unseen challenges, and capitalize on new opportunities.
- Helped female entrepreneurs across Colombia grow their businesses and confidence through a new interactive digital platform that teaches core business skills and promotes better financial habits.
- Welcomed the Center for Financial Inclusion’s new Managing Director, Mayada El-Zoghbi. Mayada has been at the forefront of inclusive finance; she’s the right person to begin CFI’s next chapter protecting customers and researching the big, unanswered questions that we must answer to create a financially inclusive world.
- Connected Mexico City’s mercados públicos with the consumers that rely on them through CÍVICO, a digital platform that helps Latin America’s entrepreneurs modernize their businesses and access financial services for the first time.
Those are just a few of the many highlights from a remarkable year: your support helped countless people and businesses around the world and will allow us to continue this important work. To everyone who gave or partnered with us in any way, thank you.
What you do for Accion means so much to so many: with 3 billion people still left out of the global financial sector, we have work to do. We’ll continue relying on you to help us create a world where everyone can meet their day-to-day needs, save for the future, and help their children learn and grow.
Thank you again, and happy holidays.
