Ethiopia’s Somali region is facing its worst drought in four decades. The calamity has left an estimated 55% of its population in urgent need of food and water. While digital financial services present a critical channel to deliver humanitarian cash and voucher assistance, the early stage of Ethiopia’s DFS ecosystem and the limited capacity of agent networks have hindered uptake.

MSC worked with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) to strengthen agent networks for humanitarian payment delivery. The project combined research, curriculum design, and training with action planning, pilot testing, and continuous advisory support. This included the development of tailored training toolkits, onboarding of financial service providers for agent network management, capacity building for last-mile service delivery, and on-site support for strategy execution.

The initiative enabled DFS partners to expand their reach and improve the efficiency of humanitarian interventions in the Somali region. By March 2024, MSC had developed three-year strategies and operational plans, delivered eight targeted training sessions to selected providers, trained and reactivated 500 agents, and sustained the activity of 300 agents.

 

The Pathways to Enhancing Financial Inclusion in India (PEFI) initiative tested and scaled solutions to strengthen cash-in-cash-out (CICO) agent networks in India. While CICO agents are critical to the extension of reliable financial services to underserved communities, yet many face lifecycle challenges that hinder their performance and threaten their sustainability. This initiative intended to empower agents, enhance resilience, reduce attrition, and improve agility in day-to-day operations to ultimately ensure better financial access for low-income and rural customers.

MSC led the design and implementation of behaviorally informed pilots that addressed critical lifecycle inflection points for agents. The team provided coaching and mentoring support through the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (IIBF) module, strengthened agent communication with rural women customers to encourage savings, evaluated new pricing models to lower merchant costs and increase transaction yields, enhanced product and service offerings to boost agent revenues, and improved agent channel performance for leading banks. MSC also developed credit underwriting models and assessment tools to help financial institutions evaluate the creditworthiness of their agents to further support network stability and growth.

These interventions delivered measurable improvements in onboarding, retention, and trust within agent networks. The pilots served as proof of concept for behaviorally informed strategies to produce positive results that supported their scale-up under the Scaling Agent Viability and Sustainability project. By enabling agents to operate more effectively and sustainably, the initiative has contributed to the expansion of reliable, inclusive financial services in underserved areas.

The Gates Foundation commissioned this project, in collaboration with partners such as the State Bank of India (SBI), NITI Aayog, India Post Payments Bank (IPPB), Fino Payments Bank, Jharkhand Rajya Gramin Bank (JRGB), Eko India Financial Services, Spice Money, Arth Digital, and the Centre for Development Orientation and Training (CDOT).

 

Mobile money agents are vital to expand financial access for underserved populations across sub-Saharan Africa. However, these agents face many challenges. Increased digital transactions threaten traditional CICO activity. Rural areas have weak distribution networks. Declining withdrawal fees also continue to erode agent commissions.

MSC assessed the sustainability of agent networks in Kenya, Mozambique, and Côte d’Ivoire to better understand these shifting dynamics. We conducted an in-depth, mixed-methods assessment of agent networks across the three countries. The study examined agent satisfaction, perceived challenges, and evolving business models in increasingly digital financial ecosystems. MSC analyzed agent-level data to uncover systemic barriers through direct engagement with agents and ecosystem players. We also reviewed these findings against market realities. The project moved beyond diagnostics to recommend customized approaches that support agent resilience, business continuity, and investment readiness.

The research revealed context-specific insights with broader implications for the mobile money industry. In Côte d’Ivoire, low commission rates were the most pressing concern. More than 80% of agents described these rates as a big challenge. In Mozambique, the shortage of working capital needed to maintain sufficient float was the primary constraint. Kenya presented a different model of resilience. More than half of the agents earned most of their income from non-mobile money activities.

These findings identified strategic recommendations to diversify agent use cases, build viable business cases for disbursements and government payments, and design targeted financing solutions. These steps will support agents in both established and emerging markets.

GSMA Mobile Money Program commissioned this project.

Cash-in and cash-out (CICO) agents are crucial to increase financial inclusion, yet they remain underfinanced across developing markets. These agents face persistent credit and liquidity gaps that hinder their business sustainability and expansion.

MSC conducted a study to understand how the digital financial services (DFS) agent distribution network functions. The study also focused on how emerging business models can reduce liquidity and credit constraints among agents. This study was conducted across the nine countries of Bangladesh, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda.

The structure, constraints, and opportunities within agent lending ecosystems across nine low- and moderate-income countries (LMICs).

MSC led a two-phase research and diagnostic engagement. In the first phase, MSC conducted comprehensive market mapping, ecosystem profiling, firm-level analysis, agent recruitment mapping, and market sizing. In the second phase, we interviewed stakeholders, developed business models, and identified key lending constraints, such as institutional reluctance, data fragmentation, and regulatory opacity.

We released a report, “Lending to cash-in and cash-out (CICO) agents: An untapped frontier in microenterprise lending,” which identified a USD 500 million to 1 billion financing opportunity. The findings offer actionable insights to improve agent viability, align incentives among ecosystem players, and unlock targeted credit solutions to scale inclusive financial services.

The Gates Foundation commissioned this project.

The India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) has pioneered financial inclusion in the country’s remotest villages with its 189,000 mail carriers nationwide, termed Grameen Dak Sevaks (GDSs). While the GDSs were a ready workforce, they needed training and handholding support to improve performance. MSC joined hands with the IPPB to enhance its capacity in various dimensions, such as product enhancement, capacity enhancement of GDSs, process efficiency, and merchant onboarding. As of 2018, the IPPB had only 15,000 active agents. The number of active GDS has increased by 73% by April 2022, but it is still only 14% of the total GDS workforce.

MSC built the GDSs’ technical and functional capabilities to enable them to offer the IPPB’s products and services. We conducted a needs assessment study with more than 2,000 agents to understand the skill gap agents struggled with in their role. We designed a highly effective and communicative training module to train the agents in multiple aspects.

The module had a script for each IPPB product for ready reference, customer acquisition strategies, and mapping of the product suite to customer personas to enhance the agents’ sales skills. This module was submitted to the IPPB’s Learning and Development team. We also created an end-user training module and a quick reference guide. The IPPB adopted these modules to train its agents. A comic book designed by MSC helped end-users conduct their operations with all safety guidelines.

With our intervention, the active agent rate increased by 40% from FY 2020-21 to FY 2021-22.

The Gates Foundation commissioned the project.

 

The learning across borders (LAB) initiative is a structured, participatory, demand-driven approach that enables countries in the Global South to share proven solutions, accelerate reforms, and cocreate innovations in areas such as digital governance, social protection, agriculture, food systems, health, and inclusive growth. 

LAB empowers countries to learn from each other’s journeys, accelerate reforms, avoid common pitfalls, and foster sustainable, inclusive growth. Through LAB, MSC provides a trusted platform for South-South collaboration. This enables countries to cocreate solutions, build capacity, and drive transformative change. Further, India has experienced accelerated socioeconomic development, innovation, and commitment to inclusive, sustainable development across multiple sectors, which makes it a model for other countries to learn from.  

MSC uses its track record in 68+ countries, deep sector expertise, and extensive public–private networks to drive impactful cross-country collaboration. Through LAB, we offer multi-modal knowledge exchange, immersive exposure visits, tailored technical support to adapt solutions to local contexts, and an inclusive and sustainable development focus.  

Since we launched “India for the World,” MSC has hosted delegations from more than 20 countries. We have connected policymakers, regulators, and innovators and enabled them to adopt practical, scalable solutions. We have hosted collaborative delegations from countries, such as Tanzania, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Indonesia. The delegations included stakeholders from the public sectors, such as, regulators, government ministries, line departments, and financial institutions. It also included private stakeholders, such as financial institutes, multilateral organizations, and technology service providers.