Financial inclusion isn’t just about access; it’s about impact. It’s about ensuring that financial services are improving people's lives. Today, we have more technology, data and momentum than ever before to understand when financial services make a difference, when they fall short and how they can be improved. Are they building resilience? Creating economic opportunities? Empowering individuals and small businesses?
Research from CGAP's Impact Pathfinder highlights that financial services are key enablers for many development outcomes. However, despite this growing evidence, there is still much to learn about the full extent of these impacts, particularly in ways that can help design better services and products. But getting those answers is not easy. Even organizations deeply committed to outcomes struggle to sustain focus on measuring and improving them, due to limited resources, inadequate capacity and incentives. Many face the challenge of balancing long-term impact goals with short-term pressures. Even the most committed teams often lack the tools, data and support to effectively assess their efforts.
That said, some organizations have found ways to prioritize outcomes and are using technology, strategic partnerships and innovative data collection methods to ensure their services are not just accessible but impactful. The question is: how can we learn from their experiences and apply those lessons across the sector? By sharing knowledge, exchanging ideas and tools and collaborating, we can better understand what works, what doesn’t and build a more outcome-focused approach across the sector.
What we're building together
The Financial Inclusion 2.0 Community on FinDev Gateway is a space for those working to create lasting impact through financial inclusion. It grew out of CGAP’s work with a diverse group of stakeholders who are focused on outcomes and eager to learn from one another. Here, practitioners, researchers, funders and policymakers are invited to share insights, tools and stories from their institutional journeys toward a stronger focus on outcomes. Here’s what we’ll focus on:
- Impact – New ways, frameworks, methods, indicators and tools to measure and understand how financial inclusion drives real change in people’s lives.
- Data – A listing of key outcome datasets and indicators available from different organizations, enabling potential sharing and collaboration to deepen our understanding of outcomes.
- Stories – Insights from financial service providers, funders, researchers and others on how they are shifting their organizations toward a stronger focus on outcomes, including what’s working, what they’re learning and how they’re measuring impact.
Why contribute to the effort?
- Help strengthen the effectiveness of financial services for greater impact.
- Contribute to the development of new methods and tools for measuring outcomes and advancing the outcome agenda.
- Join a community of peers including researchers, practitioners, donors, investors and policymakers, who are committed to driving better results and learning from each other.
Featured Resources
Financial Inclusion 2.0: A CGAP Collection
Financial Inclusion 2.0, a sector-wide initiative launched by CGAP, seeks to inspire and guide the inclusive finance sector in strengthening how we understand and measure the impact of financial services. This collection explores how CGAP is driving a stronger focus on achieving and understanding impact.
Financial Inclusion 2.0: Embracing a New Outcome Agenda
This blog explores why financial inclusion must move beyond access and usage to focus on impact. It highlights the need for stronger evidence on how financial services drive development outcomes and introduces CGAP’s Financial Inclusion 2.0 initiative.
Tools and Resources that Explore Impact on Outcomes
To understand what works, we need the right research frameworks, methods, indicators and tools. This section brings together valuable resources to help unpack how financial services contribute to development outcomes.
There’s growing momentum to invest in better data, analysis and tools that more effectively capture impact. If you’re measuring financial inclusion’s impact, developing new indicators or testing different approaches, we’d love to hear from you. Share your insights, contribute resources, and help us build a richer and more comprehensive resource base.
Featured Resources
Impact Pathfinder
Developed as part of CGAP's Financial Inclusion 2.0 initiative, the Impact Pathfinder aims to make financial inclusion evidence more accessible and actionable. It provides an easy way to access and interpret insights from the literature, supporting decision-makers including donors, investors, financial service providers, regulators and research organizations.
This paper introduces a menu of 19 indicators to measure Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) through increased financial inclusion.
Client Protection Pathways
The Client Protection Pathway describes the steps that a financial service provider can take to implement the client protection practices necessary to avoid harming clients and communicate this progress to investors. The Pathway gives providers a roadmap for implementing the Client Protection Standards and helps them stay on track.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Investing for Financial Inclusion: Four Enablers for Outcomes Measurement and Management (Paper, CGAP, Oct 2024)
- Global Partnerships Case Study: Measuring and Managing Financial Inclusion Outcomes (Paper, CGAP, Oct 2024)
Strengthening the Evidence Base Through Data
Good decisions are built on good data. Today, much of the data we have focuses on access and usage of financial services: accounts opened, loans disbursed, transactions made. But progress should not be measured by access to services themselves. It’s about what those services enable. Are people and businesses becoming more financially secure? Are they better prepared to handle shocks? Are they on a path to prosperity?
Financial service providers and others in the sector collect a lot of valuable data, but it's often underused because analyzing it can be expensive. If you’re gathering data on financial inclusion outcomes, we’d love to hear from you. Our goal is to make this data visible, helping to spark new thinking and collaboration. While we will not host the datasets here, we’ll provide descriptions and links to the data and what it can tell us. By doing this, we hope to encourage more data sharing and help everyone better understand the impact of our work.
Featured Databases
Small Firm Diaries
The small firm diaries is a multi-country study collecting high-frequency quantitative and qualitative data across eight countries in North and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
The Global Findex
The Global Findex Database has been a leading source of financial inclusion data since 2011, tracking access and use of financial services across countries, and more recently, tracking data related to customers' financial resilience.
The 60dB Microfinance Index
The Microfinance Index is a study that captures impact data directly from clients, collecting over 1.4 million data points annually to assess global financial inclusion outcomes.
Focusing on What Matters: Stories of Institutional Journeys
Numbers tell part of the story, but great insights can come from understanding the experiences behind them. Donors, investors, policymakers and financial service providers across the sector are shifting their focus to outcomes. We want to hear from organizations who are pushing the frontiers, refining indicators, developing new data collection or measurement methods, and overcoming the challenges of assessing impact.
If your organization is on a similar journey, we’d love to hear from you. What steps have you taken to shift the focus toward outcomes and impact? How are you measuring progress? What challenges have you encountered, and what insights have you gained? Share your experiences, data-driven approaches and lessons learned through a FinDev blog or interview. We’d be happy to collaborate with you to help tell your story.
How Can I Share My Resources?
We’d love to hear from you! If you have resources to share, simply use these forms to share:
- Publications – Share reports, guides and tools on financial inclusion outcomes.
- Datasets – While we don’t host data, we help others find key financial inclusion datasets.
- News – Have an update on your work on outcomes? Share it with the community.
- Events – Hosting an outcomes-focused event? Add it to our calendar or share insights on the FinDev Blog.
- Other Formats – Interested in sharing your story through a blog, interview, or another format? Email us at FinDevGateway@worldbank.org.
Before submitting, ensure your content aligns with Financial Inclusion 2.0’s outcome focus. Check the FinDev Guidelines to meet our standards for quality and relevance.
What happens when you send us your content?
The FinDev editorial team reviews all submissions to ensure they’re relevant to our global financial inclusion community and meet our quality standards. If we have any questions, we’ll follow up.
If your content meets our criteria, we’ll publish it within three to five business days. You’ll receive an email once it’s published.
If your submission does not meet our criteria, we will email you to let you know and explain why. We are always happy to answer any questions, to help you to prepare your content for publication on FinDev Gateway.