Unpacking the ground realities—what are we beginning to learn about women-owned businesses in Bangladesh?

Posted on by MSC

We had to reflect on these questions multiple times as we tried to define women business owners for the Women Business Diaries research in Bangladesh.

During the conceptualization and preparation phase of Women Business Diaries research, we considered these questions and picked “control of the business” as the defining criteria of ownership. However, we also captured data on the registration of the business.

We decided to use four objective proxy indicators on decision-making and control to define “women business owners:”

Among all women-run businesses, how many of them are women-owned?

We asked these questions to ~800 enterprises in eight districts[1] across four divisions[2] of Bangladesh. About 85% of those enterprises were women-run. Here is what we learned:

  1. Women own only a portion of women-managed businesses.

Only 53% of women who managed businesses were business owners, as per our definition. However, among men, this proportion is 84%. The gender gap increased further in decision-making on loans and business management. We observed the following:

  • 65% of women and 95% of men make final decisions on day-to-day business management activities, such as purchasing supplies;
  • 59% of women and 93% of men make final major business management decisions, such as investing or changing suppliers, opening new outlets, and starting new business lines;
  • 59% of women and 87% of men make a final decision regarding taking a loan for business;
  • 70% of women and 95% of men decide how to use the money they earn from the business.
  1. Six in 10 women-owned businesses lack the required documentation.

We checked the availability of the most basic documentation—a trading license—an indicator of formalization in Bangladesh. About 60% of the women business owners, who fit our definition, lacked a trading license. This proportion is just 19% for men.

  1. A third of the businesses licensed in a woman’s name are not women-owned.

About 33% of all businesses with a trading license in the name of a woman are not really owned by the woman, as per our definition. This proportion is lower for men. Out of all the businesses with a trade license in the name of a man, the man is not the actual owner in only 14% of the cases.

Evidence shows that women-owned businesses are not a homogenous group. We find that:

  1. Locations influence the choice of enterprise by women: Our sample highlighted significant geographic differences in the businesses that women own. In the Khulna division, 35% of women-owned businesses were agri- or livestock-based, whereas only 4% fell into these categories in the Rangpur division. In contrast, service-related enterprises dominate the women-owned businesses in Dhaka by 56% and 50% in Chattogram. About 66% of women-owned businesses are retail or wholesale trading in the Rangpur division.

Open questions: Are the differences because the geo-political and social dynamics in the regions restrict certain business types and promote other business types, or is it something else? We will unpack these questions during our Financial Diaries research.

  1. Business management practices vary across business types: Maintaining an inventory ledger is most common among agri- and livestock-based businesses (30%) and least common among manufacturing businesses (19%). Some form of bookkeeping or maintaining accounts is most common in the trading business (80%) and least common in the manufacturing business (33%).

Why do manufacturing businesses have such limited records and bookkeeping? That is another question for us to unpack.

What challenges do women-owned businesses face?

From the early discussions with our diarists, our findings reinforce that women-run businesses face disproportionate barriers due to gender-discriminatory social and cultural norms. They have limited access to financial services, poor access to information, little technical support on business development, and smaller business networks. Some other barriers that women business owners face include the following:

[1] Dhaka, Munshiganj, Chattogram, Feni, Rangpur, Nilphamari, Khulna, Satkhira

[2] Dhaka, Chattogram, Rangpur, Khulna

Limited access to finance, mainly due to a lack of collaterals and institutional perceptions that view women business owners as high-risk, leads to under-capitalization of businesses, negatively impacting their income and living standards. During their entrepreneurial journey, women face the usual range of gaps in financial services that include:

We will delve more deeply into these as the research progresses.

Further, social norms also pose a challenge for women-owned businesses. The socially accepted gender roles, such as unpaid care work, make it mandatory for women to balance household duties with their enterprises. Moreover, women are expected to prioritize unpaid care work at home over income generation.

Many unanswered questions

This note is a sneak peek into the lives of women business owners in Bangladesh. However, so many questions are still unanswered. For example, the Bangladesh market offers no definitive way to describe whether a business is formal. Further, ownership of a trading license is the most commonly used metric for business ownership. But does having a trading license help a business? If yes, then how? Does it ensure more access to finance? What about the tax implications? Does the cost of being formal outweigh its benefits?

Stay tuned as we attempt to answer these questions and more in the future editions of our “The big smalls of Bangladesh” insights series.

Please write to us at rahul.chatterjee@microsave.net to share your thoughts about the insights presented in this edition or send us a burning question in the Bangladesh market.

Women business diaries: Unpacking a 360-degree view of women-run businesses in Bangladesh

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Shumi and Sajia—two entrepreneurs of a similar profile but with very different stories

Shumi Akhter, 38, runs a dairy business in rural Munshiganj. About five years ago, she came across a YouTube video on dairy farming that caught her attention. She was so intrigued that she started researching online and reached out to her local markets to explore the potential of a dairy business in her area. She spoke to prospective customers, such as local sweetmeat shops and dairy cooperatives. Once she had finalized a few in-principle deals with them, she invested BDT 400,000 (USD 3,928) from the monthly remittances her husband sends from Singapore, where he works as an electrical mechanic. She started the business with three milch cows.

Sajia Akhter, 40, owns a beauty parlor in Dhaka, which she started around 12 years ago. Her motivation to start the business was to establish a source of income for her family, as her husband lacked secure employment or a well-established business. Her capital to start the business was around BDT 150,000 (USD 1,473), out of which she borrowed BDT 100,000 (USD 982) from her sister and used the remaining amount from her savings. She achieved limited success, but her business did not grow significantly, and she operates the finances and management of the enterprise on her own. Her only help is her daughter, who learned beauty skills from her mother and assisted her during work hours. Sajia does not have big ambitions for the business—she wants to be able to repay her loans and have enough money left to run the parlor.

Shumi and Sajia are among the ~600,000 women-run cottage or micro, small, and medium enterprises (CMSMEs) in Bangladesh. Sajia’s story represents the perils of women-run businesses, and Shumi’s story is a beacon of hope. But what is the real problem? What is holding up a seasoned entrepreneur like Sajia, and what enabled Shumi to grow her business so fast? The most commonly prescribed “silver bullets” are access to finance and skills development. But we must understand other essential factors affecting WMSEs to understand the whole picture.

A 360-degree view of the women business owners’ lives

Little evidence is available on how women-owned businesses are run. The impact of social norms restricting women’s agency is also unclear. Hypotheses, such as men making business decisions for WMSEs and women preferring different types of businesses compared to men, are emerging only now due to research on microenterprises. In this context, coupled with the motivation to reduce access to finance barriers for women entrepreneurs, MSC has started a Women business diaries-based action research in Bangladesh, with support from the Gates Foundation. We will track all financial and nonfinancial transactions of ~500 women entrepreneurs.

MSC will take a comprehensive view of the lives of women business owners, including their financial life, business management, digital life, and personal life. Figure 1 summarizes the different dimensions of women entrepreneurs’ life that we will capture in this research. We will collaborate with financial institutions to use insights from this action research to develop gender-centric financial products to help WMSEs in Bangladesh.

We have a variety of women-run businesses in our sample, including apparel businesses, grocery shops, eateries, artisans, tailors, beauty parlor owners, and agriculture and livestock-related businesses. We use MSC’s DatIn app to track these WMSEs’ daily financial transactions, such as income, expenses, savings, and credit. Further, we use digital technologies to analyze the collected data. We also conduct regular in-depth interviews and IVR-based surveys to understand the reasons behind their financial decisions and different aspects of their lives.

What is in store?

We have completed profiling the diarists, and the diarists have started to record their daily financial transactions. Over time, a fuller picture of the lives of WMSEs will emerge as the data starts pouring in. We will share the insights through a series of knowledge pieces called “The big smalls of Bangladesh—Insights on women-owned enterprises in Bangladesh.” The different editions of this series will provide insights into the lives of women entrepreneurs. These insights will further help start a conversation on the need for a contextualized multidimensional strategy to help WMSEs.

Watch this space as we dive deeper into the lives of these WMSEs.

Transitioning the informal economy to a formal one

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We express our sincere gratitude for the support from the Deputy Minister Ms. Lenny Rosalin from the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection, Indonesia on this engagement. However, the views expressed in this blog does not necessarily represent the view of the Ministry. 

This blog is the last of our three-part series on women’s participation in the digital economy. It is an outcome of MSC’s work with the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection in Indonesia for the G20 Ministerial Conference for Women Empowerment. Read earlier blogs in this series  .

The informal economy provides jobs for 61% of the global workforce. This large workforce has low skills and productivity levels, irregular income, unsafe working conditions, and lacks access to credit. As seen during the economic fallout of COVID-19, a large informal workforce leads to a vulnerable population because workers lack adequate social safety nets.

Developing countries often prioritize the formalization of enterprises in their MSME development policies. The benefits of formalization include increased access to credit, higher productivity, and better social protection, while governments gain from a higher tax base.

Despite these apparent benefits, why does informality persist?

In this final blog, we explore the need to modulate our approach to formalization and how the digital economy can enable this process.

Align the policy imperatives of formalization with the needs of the informal economy

Informality in low- and middle-income countries persists, partly due to the lack of formal employment opportunities in the economy. In addition, the compliance costs associated with formalization incentivize firms to remain small and informal. Further, the imperatives of competition and globalization force certain employers, such as in the garment industry, to convert formal jobs with benefits into informal piece-rate work with no benefits.

In addition, women in the informal economy must adjust to the realities shaped by social norms and domestic responsibilities that control the nature of economic opportunities available to them. These challenges ensure that formalization is not a choice for most women.

Therefore, policy objectives should reduce rigidity around the formalization process. Policies should focus on supporting incremental formalization that offers tangible benefits regarding access to credit, information, and markets at a low cost.

The rise of digital platform models in the digital economy offers a unique opportunity to support the informal sector’s transition to a more formal workforce. We discuss the unique attributes of digital platform work and the possibilities for greater formalization, focusing on women in the informal economy.

The digital economy can lead to achieving greater formalization

Digital gig platforms serve as intermediaries that connect service providers and customers at scale. These platforms operate in informal sectors, such as taxi and ride-hailing services, delivery services, home services, domestic help, and beauty services.

The business model of digital platforms offers an on-ramp to greater formalization in the workforce. We outline four areas where digital platforms can lower the barriers to the formalization of women’s work.

  1. Availability of data: As an aggregator of services, digital platforms are repositories of data on the workforce and their economic engagements.  Access to platform data can address the challenge of low visibility over informal employment, which impedes the government’s ability to design better policies for the informal economy.
  2. Skilling of the workforce: The business models of digital platforms and their success depends on high levels of consistent customer service. Platforms invest in standardizing and upskilling workers to meet higher standards. The experience and association with platform companies can lead to a better perception of women’s skills.
  3. Access to formal financial services: Platform work enables formalization efforts because workers receive payouts regularly into their bank accounts or digital wallets. Building financial histories increases their chances of accessing financial services, such as credit and insurance.
  4. Increased productivity: Workers can access better services on digital platforms, such as job discovery and matching services. These platforms allow informal workers to find more work compared to a traditional offline market.

However, despite this potential, multiple   across countries highlight how platform workers struggle to access fair pay, fair working conditions, and fair contracts.

G20 member countries must focus on a multipronged policy approach to ensure the growth of the digital economy leads to more formalization. We discuss some potential principles of such policy measures.

Principles that can support women informal workers on digital platforms

  1. Use data to make informed choices on support to workers

As Galperin and Randolph suggest, policymakers and regulators should forge partnerships with platforms to access this data to understand the work and workers better. This data can then inform policies on the classification of workers, their roles, the responsibilities of the platforms toward workers, and the role of the government, among other areas.

  1. Governments should encourage the creation of an ecosystem of service providers that can support women workers’ efforts to formalize

An important consideration for women workers and entrepreneurs to become more formal is the move’s cost-effectiveness. They face particular challenges as they interact with platforms in the digital economy. Women need increased access to various services as they grow within the digital economy. These services can include skill and capacity building, technology products, taxation and compliance management, and other nonfinancial business development support.

Policymakers should create an enabling ecosystem of service providers, civil society organizations, and individuals to effectively offer these products and services to women workers that lower formalization costs. An example of such an enabling ecosystem is the Women Entrepreneurship HUB (WE HUB), run by the Government of Telangana in India. The initiative gathers stakeholders, such as government departments, corporates, industry, academia, and individuals, as mentors to support female entrepreneurs.

  1. Support the development of alternative economic models for the digital economy

Women collectives and cooperatives have long been part of developmental strategies for women’s empowerment. These networks allow women to collectively benefit from increased economic interactions and lower the chances of failure.

Digital technologies have helped create an alternative model for digital platforms that workers can own and manage. These platforms offer a different version of growth-centering worker benefits. Governments need to support measures that promote the development of such alternate models.

The digital economy offers an opportunity to bring many informal workers into the formal economy. This increase in formalization will help develop a skilled and productive workforce and improve the economic resilience of workers. However, realizing a truly inclusive digital economy will depend on the worker-centric transition of the informal economy to an inclusive formal one.

This three-part blog series discussed the issues and challenges of women’s participation in the digital economy. We argue that governments, private sector players, and other stakeholders must understand the nature of women’s economic interaction in the informal economy and   customized support that increases their ability to continue in the labor force. Our recommendations can help develop a more formal, inclusive, and resilient digital economy.

Women in the digital economy

Posted on by MSC

Eighteen months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the workforce had 13 million fewer women in employment in 2021 than in 2019. As social distancing mandates and lockdown restrictions impacted work, the role of digital technologies in enabling economic transactions became prominent. However, among men and women. Further, the gender divide in access to digital technologies and their use negatively women’s ability to participate in the labor force.

With this backdrop, the recently-concluded G20 Ministerial Conference on Women Empowerment in Bali, Indonesia, highlighted the need for a common gender framework to fulfill the goals of “Recover Together Recover Stronger.” MSC supported the Indonesian Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection (KemenPPPA) to articulate a vision to improve women’s participation in all forms of work in the digital economy.

This three-part blog series highlights the need to focus on women’s participation in the digital economy to reduce the gender gap in the labor force. The series focuses on informal workers, who represent 61% of the workforce worldwide, in the digital economy and their challenges.

Where do women in the informal economy work?

Most women in the informal sector work repetitive, low-skilled, and poorly paid jobs. Some broad categories of women’s informal work are:

  1. Home-based workers: Women in Informal Employment Organizing and Globalizing (WIEGO) defines home-based workers as those “who produce goods or services in or near their homes for local, domestic, or global markets.”
  2. Women as entrepreneurs or owners of small businesses: Women in this category run an enterprise, usually a nano- or micro-enterprise, as an income-generation activity. Most of these women operate from home or near their homes.
  3. Women in domestic work: Women in domestic work provide services in their employer’s private homes. These services may include sweeping, cleaning, cooking, and caring for children and the elderly.
  4. Women in the beauty and wellness sector: Women in this sector provide beauty and salon services either as part of an enterprise through an employee or are self-employed.

The four categories outlined here are not mutually exclusive, as women migrate between these categories depending on their situation. Yet, they struggle more in terms of limitations on time, mobility, resources, and social constraints than men, no matter the category of work.

The digitization of women’s work

As economies worldwide went into lockdown in 2020, digital platforms gained prominence as essential public infrastructure to provide key services. Digital platforms emerged as important intermediaries connecting service providers—workers—with the demand-side players—employers. Digital platforms opened new markets and extended work opportunities for women who previously lacked access to work.

Digital platforms in G20 countries grew from 128 to 611 between 2010 and 2020, as per the ILO. Three types of digital platforms that have implications for women’s work are:

Opportunities and challenges for women in the digital economy

Digital platforms offer several options to women by overcoming some traditional barriers to women’s involvement in higher-value work. They reduce women’s barriers to entry and re-entry into the workforce. Their business models require digital platforms to focus on the professionalization and training of workers—and so some facilitate the training and skill development of these women. Research in India indicates that well-known apps and platforms formalize and legitimize women’s work. This benefit of digital platforms, coupled with the focus on professionalization, improves the social acceptability of women’s work.

However, the benefits of digital platforms vary across sectors or countries. Information and communications technology (ICT) can connect women to jobs and markets, overcoming several socioeconomic constraints. However, technology can also recreate and amplify existing inequalities in the labor market—disproportionately hurting women’s labor force participation. Evidence from India’s domestic worker sector shows the significant impact of on-demand digital work, which excludes women who lack digital skills, digital devices, or access to formal banking channels. MSC’s research with women’s cooperatives in Indonesia highlights similar challenges around access to digital platforms and their use.

Addressing key challenges will allow the digital economy to work for women

Identify and define different types of work in the digital economy

Labor regulations in most countries often do not protect nonstandard forms of work that lack a traditional employee-employer relationship. Informal workers remain invisible to the government in a regulatory environment designed for accessing worker rights with formal employment as the basis.

Such invisibility prevents workers from accessing worker protection measures, such as social protection, maternity pay, and statutory minimum wage. Many workers in the digital economy also lack access to worker protection measures. Besides, inadequate classification of gig or platform workers often excludes them from government programs designed to support informal workers.

Governments may have to modify existing laws to define and recognize gig and platform workers. This definition will help align government policy and implementation with workers’ needs and help them realize the full economic potential of this emerging class of work. An example of such modification is India’s Code on Social Security, which defined gig and platform workers for the first time.

Improve access to digital devices and tools for women

In the future of work, women’s access to digital infrastructure will determine their rate of participation in education, technological adoption, and the labor force. Women’s digital inclusion is imperative for them to participate meaningfully in the digital economy. About 18% of women, 315 million women, are less likely to own a smartphone than men. Similarly, the gender gap in mobile internet access is at 16%.

G20 member countries need to include the collection of gender-disaggregated data to understand the gender gaps in access and usage of digital tools, including access to the internet. Further, governments should devise innovative financing mechanisms that subsidize access to mobile phones and affordable internet services, such as universal access funds.

Create the infrastructure to improve women’s digital skills

Building skills for the digital economy is integral to ensuring sustainable growth and productivity in the future of work. Digital skilling programs for women need to consider the low levels of formal education in low- and moderate-income countries, leading to lower reading, writing, STEM, and language capacities. The gender gap in digital skills translates directly into lower economic benefits for women workers with lower skills to work in the ICT sector, creating thousands of jobs. Therefore, governments and digital platforms must apply a gender lens while designing skilling systems for the digital economy.

Policymakers and governments across G20 countries should focus on creating a skilling infrastructure that equips women with 21st-century skills, such as:

  1. The 4Cs—critical thinking, creative pitching, collaboration, and communication;
  2. Modern education enables them to access information on the internet, develop basic financial and digital literacy, and understand markets using social media and digital platforms.

Policymakers in each of the G20 member countries should strive to create a strategy that outlines basic, intermediate, and advanced levels of digital skills, specifically focusing on addressing the gender gap in digital skills. The implementation strategy should include a national baseline and target increasing the proportion of women and girls with a high level of digital skills.

Alongside the measures outlined above, achieving a fair digital for women informal workers will require efforts on two overlapping themes—adaptive worker protections for the informal economy and managing the transition to the formal economy—discussed in our subsequent blogs.

Designing adaptive worker protections for the digital economy

Posted on by MSC

This blog is the second of our three-part series on women’s participation in the digital economy. It is an outcome of MSC’s work with the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection in Indonesia for the G20 Ministerial Conference for Women Empowerment. Read the first blog of this series here.

By mid-2021, a typical informal worker earned only 64% of their pre-COVID-19 pandemic earnings, while 82% of the workers could not replace any savings they exhausted through the pandemic months.

Informal workers constitute 55% of the global workforce who lack access to any social protection program. The absence of social protection disproportionately impacts women as they comprise most of the informal workforce. The world urgently needs better social safety nets that protect workers during a crisis.

The rapid digitization of work in the informal economy offers an opportunity to increase women’s participation in the labor force. However, any tangible increase in women’s labor-market participation will require adequate social protections that reduce the burden of women’s unpaid work at home. This blog discusses the opportunities and challenges in creating such a social protection architecture in the digital economy.

The divergence in access to social protection among developed and developing economies in the G20

Despite the availability of formal and legal work in a digital economy, a wide gap persists in access to social protection in developed and developing countries. The table below summarizes the difference in access to social protection among workers on web-based platforms for developed and developing countries in G20.

Limited regulations on universal social security coupled with fiscal challenges lead to inadequate publicly-funded protection for informal workers in developing economies. Moreover, the low state capacities of developing countries create hurdles in developing and implementing social protection in the digital economy.

Women’s burden of care increased during the COVID-19 pandemic

Women traditionally face more barriers than men in accessing the job market. Our previous blog described the challenges women faced from historical disadvantages, such as low education and skills.

Moreover, women face barriers, such as sociocultural norms that control women’s mobility and economic activities. The COVID-19 pandemic magnified unpaid care and domestic workloads, with women carrying the heaviest burdens across all countries. Women’s time spent in unpaid care work accounted for 16.4 billion hours per day, with women contributing 76.2% of the total time spent. These trends threaten the continued progress of including women in the labor force.

In this context, the growth of “flexible” digital platforms has a dual effect on women’s work. The flexibility allows women to continue in the labor force by adjusting work timings to available time. Yet, their economic interactions continue to depend on the as social roles around domestic and care work take priority. Such expectations force women to work longer hours to earn as much as their male counterparts.

Developing adaptive worker protection measures for the digital economy

International Labour Organization’s World Employment and Social Outlook report in 2021 points to at least 777 active digital platforms focusing on online web-based and location-based platforms in January, 2021. Such digital platforms have grown from 128 to 611 in the G20 countries in the past decade. These platforms provide economic opportunities that benefit workers but also involve substantial risks around the regularity of income, working conditions, and social protection. Workers in the digital economy are typically classified as independent contractors and lack comprehensive coverage under labor or social security laws.

Many governments design social security systems assuming “standard” employment with a traditional employer-employee relationship. As a result, nonstandard not offer social security protection. Informal workers in the digital economy are more exposed to risks due to the nature of their work and the inconsistencies in employment terms. The increasing number of gig workers across economies, coupled with events like COVID-19 that led to further economic disruption, highlights the need for robust worker protections.

Moreover, social protection policies are not gender-responsive. More than 100 countries adopted social protection measures to cope with COVID-19—yet only 22.8% were gender-sensitive. The lack of a traditional employee-employer relationship for workers in the digital economy has further complicated social protection for them. Therefore, employer-linked social protection may not suit workers in the digital economy.

In light of these factors, G20 member countries need to modify existing social protection architectures to suit the needs of the digital economy, and here are some of our recommendations:

1. Set a national target to ensure a gender-responsive universal social protection floor for workers

Governments must ensure that all workers have a basic safety net irrespective of the nature and type of their work. Governments must set a national target followed by an adequate budget allocation to create a gender-responsive universal social protection floor for workers in line with the ILO Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202).

G20 governments must take steps to create inter-governmental funding to support developing and emerging nations in creating such social protection measures.

2. Social protection architecture should respond to newer digital work or enterprises offering non-standard work

In addition to universal social protection floors, governments must develop accessible and affordable contributory programs for workers, platforms, and governments to participate.

Workers in the digital economy often offer their services across multiple platforms. Designing social protection for such flexible workplaces will require moving away from the current employer-linked social protection systems. Governments can achieve this by encouraging the creation of platforms that allow workers to accumulate their social protection benefits across multiple workplaces. However, arriving at the ideal model for each country should be an iterative process that accounts for the respective labor force’s unique characteristics and the preexisting social security model.

3. Publicly funded, affordable, and quality care infrastructure to increase women’s participation in paid work

Governments must adopt policies that recognize, reduce, and redistribute women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid work in line with SDG 5.4. National social safety nets should consider women’s lifetime loss of earnings due to their role as primary caregivers and accordingly design differentiated gender-equitable social security programs.

Some examples of such initiatives include the Survey of time use and valuation of unpaid domestic work in Mexico, the provision of a range of public care services in Uruguay, and employment-related care policies in South Korea.

Policymakers need to adopt innovative financing programs to help create publicly funded, affordable, and quality care infrastructures within communities to reduce the burden of unpaid care on women and create jobs in the care sector.

The pandemic’s impact on informal workers—especially women—highlights the need for a well-rounded social protection architecture that protects workers. A responsive social protection system is important because the growth of digital platforms in the past decade has changed the nature of the economic interaction of informal workers. Governments must now take the lead in ensuring that workers—especially women—have greater access to protections that increases their ability to keep working.

Read our next blog to learn how an inclusive social protection architecture for the digital economy can drive greater formalization.

Top MSC blogs of 2022

Posted on by MSC

1) How has IPPB improved financial inclusion in India through a differentiated banking approach?

India Post Payments Bank is one of India’s most successful payments banks. Its collaboration model created a positive impact on bridging the financial inclusion gap. This blog offers lessons for financial institutions worldwide that wish to build robust strategies, launch new lines of pro-poor products, and unlock efficiencies in distribution through capacity-building initiatives.

2) The evolution of payments in India—the state of play

In recent years, India has moved to a leading position in digital payments and developed an ecosystem that enables the uptake and usage of digital payments. Many countries now seek to replicate India’s payments systems, particularly the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This blog highlights the evolution of India’s payments landscape and looks into issues and ideas that contributed to this evolution.

3) Credit for low- and moderate-income people in Bangladesh—can new-age banks and FinTechs deliver the regulator’s wish?

The waves of digitization and technological advancements in Bangladesh encouraged 60% of the country’s population to open MFS accounts. The country now boasts more than 1.1 million agents. Despite the widespread use of MFS and internet access, only 9.1% of people access the formal credit system. This blog shows how digital credit can be a stepping stone in Bangladesh due to the lower cost of digital credit delivery, combined with the mass digital readiness of consumers.

4) They deliver, they survive, and finally, they BELONG—Blue-collar workers in India are now “Entitled” to what they deserve for their services

India has more than 250 million blue-collared employees who need essential benefits. The startup Entitled works with employers to strengthen their financial health by designing bundled financial products, such as credit and insurance, for the well-being of blue-collared workers. Solid financial health will give these workers a blanket during financial shocks. Entitled is gradually developing innovative delivery channels and products to enrich the user onboarding experience.

5) “Train me like this”: Lessons from the pilot on IIBF BC/BF certification

Between 2012 and 2021, only 62% of approximately 300,000 agents, who appeared for the IIBF BC/BF exam, passed the exam. This blog closely examines the challenges BC agents face in passing the IIBF BC/BF exam. It also offers suggestions to policymakers on graded certifications based on the type of services the BCs provide.

6) Putting India’s demographic dividend to work: Skill development for a digital economy

India sees 13 million young people joining the workforce every year. Yet many fail to get employment. Overwhelmingly, 70% of the workforce is still engaged in the informal sector, which does not provide job benefits, such as the safety of tenure or a social safety net. In this blog, we discuss the need to expand the current skilling architecture in India to help youth thrive in the digital economy. The blog also offers specific recommendations on its implementation.

7) Do young entrepreneurs need new skills in a rapidly evolving digital world?

Lockdowns and restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic increased the usage of digital technology and tools across the globe. This blog discusses the importance of developing digital skills for youth to thrive in today’s digital world. We also outline the critical steps to be followed during digital skills training to increase its practical applicability.

8) Jumpstarting the savings journey for low- and moderate-income people in Vietnam

Saving after managing expenses remains a priority for people from the LMI segment in Vietnam who aspire to lead a better life, absorb income shocks, and strengthen their financial resilience. However, formal savings remain a challenge, particularly in rural areas. In this blog, MSC proposes a three-pronged approach to foster small savings for LMI people in Vietnam using technology, smart product design, and innovative distribution platforms.

9) Could 2022 be the watershed moment for the CICO networks in Indonesia?

In 2014, Indonesian policymakers passed regulations for branchless banking. The regulations gave impetus to the CICO networks as a last-mile delivery channel for financial access. This blog looks at crucial changes and implications of the new draft amendments to the branchless banking regulations released by OJK in 2021.

10) A fine-tuned approach to digital platform design and development in Africa—Part I

This blog is the first of a two-blog series examining the JobTech market in Africa. In this series, we explore the growth of digital platforms and look at constraints to sustainability. The blog offers recommendations on building platforms in informal economies and explores systemic constraints that hinder the sustainability and scalability of job-matching platforms in Africa.

Read more publications from our work in 2022 here.