Poverty and Migration in the Digital Age: Experimental Evidence on Mobile Banking in Bangladesh

This study traces the impact of mobile money transfers on rural poverty. Migrants actively using the technology increased remittances sent by 30% in value.

Global Microscope 2018: The Enabling Environment for Financial Inclusion

It sets a model for an enabling environment for financial inclusion across five domains: 1. Government and Policy Support; 2. Stability and Integrity; 3. Products and Outlets; 4. Consumer Pr…

Fintech for Financial Inclusion: A Framework for Digital Financial Transformation-A Report to the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI)

The paper outlines potential for growth for FinTech for financial inclusion while emphasising on the need for regulatory approaches , citing some successful cases from India , Kenya and China.

The Impact of Formal Savings on Salaried Workers’ Spending and Borrowing in Eastern Ghana

This J-PAL study looks at the impact of commitment savings linked to electronic salary payments. While the results varied for different users, the research highlights the importance of using…

Financial inclusion, a driver of state building in India and Mexico?

This article situates latest trends within the evolution of Indian and Mexican social policies and discusses how on one hand financial inclusion policies allow vulnerable populations to access new rights while resulting in new ways of controlling consumer behavior.

Saving by Default: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural India

Access to banks is rapidly increasing worldwide, and allows account-based instead of cash transfers. We conduct a randomized experiment documenting the impact of the payment method on saving…

The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food, Vouchers, or Cash Transfers?

With 1.5 billion people covered globally, food and voucher programs provide an important lifeline for the poor and vulnerable. The study – The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food, Vouchers or …

Building the capacity of public health programmes to become data rich, information rich and action rich

Good quality, timely data are the cornerstone of health systems, but in many countries these data are not used for evidence-informed decision making and/or for improving public health. The S…

Bridging the Digital Divide and Supporting Increased Digital Trade: Scoping Study

The global economy is experiencing important technological shifts, with the rise of digital technology a key driver. This can be seen today in the rapid growth of the digital economy, broadl…

Branchless banking: Evaluating the doorstep delivery of financial services in rural India

This paper evaluates the effect on household savings of India’s recent financial inclusion drive, a drive that generated an unprecedented increase in access to financial institutions by usin…

Blockchain for humanitarian action and development aid

Blockchain technology is swiftly entering the fields of humanitarian and development aid. While it has the potential to revolutionize the aid sector, e.g., through pairing smart contracts wi…

Unlocking digital for Bharat: 50 Billion opportunity

This research focused on developing insights on understanding key user barriers and interventions required across various stages of the user journey …

Young women key to digital payments adoption

With 180 million unbanked people, Indonesia is one of the most valuable untapped digital payments markets in the Asia Pacific region. According to a Think with Google paper, women aged 25-34 will be the key to enabling adoption in the country.

Prerequisites to digitizing the agricultural last mile

Distribution 2.0: The future of mobile money agent distribution networks

In December 2017, there were over 2.9 million active agents and 690 million registered customer accounts worldwide. Primarily responsible for registering customer accounts, mobile money agen…

Building inclusive payment ecosystems in Tanzania and Ghana

At the heart of this financial transformation is the rise of digital payments services through which nearly any individual or business can send or receive money in real time for almost any p…

Digitizing Uganda’s Education Sector with Mobile Payment Platform

A new payment platform launched by Mastercard, UNICEF and the Ministry of Education in Uganda is gaining traction, reaching over 130,000 registered students in just one year….

A Step Forward to Take Haryana on Digital Track: Digital Haryana

We are living in a scenario of technology and digital world. Digital world comprises of digital techniques. Government has dreamed to transform India into Techno-Knowledge based India. Gover…

Imagining Trillion Dollar Digital India

The document presents a vision for how India’s digital economy can unlock productivity and value – through transformative infrastructure, applications and ecosystems. It also outlines iconic…

Why Do Defaults Affect Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan

We report on an experiment examining why default options impact behavior. By randomly assigning employees to different varieties of a salary-linked savings account, we find that default enro…