Client-Product Connection

The Center for Financial Inclusion promotes ways that microfinance can bring greater quality financial products and services to the poor. We want to ensure that the evolving industry of financial services for the poor remains client focused. The Center will seek opportunities to increase the value of financial services by promoting life-changing services like health insurance and energy loans, searching for process breakthroughs that increase convenience while reducing costs, and pushing towards services for groups still not adequately reached. The Center for Financial Inclusion defines its quality objective by emphasizing: a broader and cheaper array of products, a greater focus on products that help solve key life problems, increased convenience, and a push to reach the poor who have been hardest to access.

Projects & Activities

Financial Inclusion: What's the Vision?

Financial Inclusion is about creating financial systems that support all people – especially those previously excluded – by providing them with access to financial services delivered in a convenient, reliable and affordable manner. Read more about the Center's definition of Financial Inclusion.  

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Energy Links

The Center’s Energy Links project – a new pilot program in Uganda – aims to bring renewable energy to microfinance clients, contribute to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and give MFIs a viable “business-in-a-box.”

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Business Solutions for Housing at the Bottom of the Pyramid 
 

While housing microfinance has been promoted for some time, housing finance for the poor has yet to truly take off. Why? In collaboration with Bankable Frontier Associates, the Center for Financial Inclusion and ACCION Interntational's Global Investments group broke through the typical sector-specific walls and brought together thirteen housing-finance professionals from Mexico, South Africa, Kenya, and India for a workshop on private-sector responses to housing finance in emerging markets. This mix of unusual suspects – developers, microfinance practitioners, and wholesalers – provided unique multi-sector approach to addressing housing finance needs.

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Microfinance and Climate Change Working Group

The FIELD Microfinance and Climate Change Working Group is chaired by the Center for Financial Inclusion and run in collaboration with the Academy for Educational Development (AED). The working group is funded by FIELD, USAID’s Financial Integration, Economic Leveraging, Broad-Based Dissemination and Support program. Working with FIELD consortium members and specialists in microfinance and climate change issues, the group is a forum for learning, information exchange and advocacy on the role of microfinance institutions in combating climate change.