Recap of Financial Inclusion Week Twitter chat: Getting digital inclusion right
CEGA’s Digital Credit Observatory co-hosted a Twitter chat with J-PAL’s Finance sector for Acción’s fourth annual Financial Inclusion Week 2018 .This summary post, written by J-PAL Policy Associate Mikaela Robb, was originally published on the J-PAL Blog.
Globally, 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked without an account at a financial institution or mobile money provider according to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2017 report. Yet, two thirds of these unbanked adults have a mobile phone, making digital technology a great opportunity to broaden financial inclusion.
On October 31st, J-PAL’s Finance sector and the Center for Effective Global Action’s Digital Credit Observatory hosted a Twitter chat about digital financial inclusion as part of Acción’s fourth annual Financial Inclusion Week 2018.
This year’s #FinclusionWeek theme was “Getting Inclusion Right,” so we invited the Twitter community to join our discussion and ask questions about getting digital inclusion right.
Over fifty people participated by asking questions, sharing evidence, or liking and retweeting posts, including J-PAL affiliates Dean Karlan, Paul Niehaus, and Tavneet Suri, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and the World Bank’s Global Findex.
Some of the main take-aways include:
- Early evidence suggests the promising potential of digital finance to increase financial inclusion and improve households’ welfare.
- Digital finance may also expand access to financial services and products to the most marginalized populations, particularly women and the very poor, but barriers remain to achieving equal access.
- Digital finance also brings risks to consumers and financial providers; regulations and consumer protection are necessary to ensure responsible digital finance.
- Researchers continue to pursue new and exciting research on digital finance (many shared during the Twitter chat), with many interesting, open questions left.
To read the complete blog post, see here.
