Art Appraisal Blog

During the pandemic, Duong Thi Thuy, a mobile money agent in the Quang Ninh province, improvised her business to help her community follow the guidelines on social distancing and government norms. This is her story about the adoption of DFS and how it changed her life.

Since the onset of the pandemic, the low- and moderate-income (LMI) segment had a direct impact on their day-to-day life. We reflect through Kabita, an LMI customer in Bangladesh, on the barriers LMIs faced during the pandemic and how DFS nudged them towards building resilience.

Increasing women's economic empowerment is an important motivation for expanding access to digital financial services for women.

For government-to-person payments to truly benefit the most vulnerable during COVID-19, they must tackle the inequalities that women are facing due to the pandemic.

Given pre-existing gender gaps, there are concerns about exclusion for many of the social assistance programs being rolled out around the world in response to COVID-19. Social protection systems that ignore gender inequality will likely fail to mitigate the risks of the pandemic for women, and, at worst, could further exacerbate inequalities. Therefore, inclusive economic policies that empower women and create resilience now and for the future must be designed to ensure women contribute to the global recovery. This paper offers guidance and considerations for policymakers to support women’s inclusion and empowerment.

This Briefing provides guidance to policymakers to work with financial sector regulators and implement COVID-19 social assistance payments that facilitate rapid, remote account opening in compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules.

Around the world, women are being hit hard by the economic impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus). As the fallout from the pandemic deepens, so do the short and longer term effects on women's empowerment. The insecurity and lack of social protection that characterize informal, temporary, unpaid labor put millions of women and their families at extreme risk: in many developing countries, most women in paid work were working informally - around 95 percent in Asia and 89 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Financial institutions and governments have been working for years to leverage digitized G2P for women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment. COVID-19 has increased the stakes, as governments look to use G2P programs to strengthen women’s resilience. New research from Women’s World Banking offers insights on Indonesia’s PKH program, the country’s largest conditional cash transfer.

Around the world, cash transfer programs are being implemented by governments in response to COVID-19. Pakistan introduced the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Program, which requires mobile phones and national IDs to register. Using data from the 2018 Financial Inclusion Insights survey, we estimate large gender gaps in mobile phone ownership and national ID possession, leaving women are at risk of being disproportionately excluded from the program. To address this, the government should ensure women are more purposefully targeted, perhaps by reserving more slots for women or prioritizing women's registrations.

This case study documents what drove the Zambian Ministry of Community Development and Social Services to develop an innovative, choice-based digital payments system and how this new multi-provider payments model has worked in practice.