Adriana Carolina Armos Cuesta and her colleagues analyzed the National Financial Inclusion Strategies of 16 countries. Although 1 billion people in the world live with disabilities, this segment comprises less than 0.5 percent of the customers of global microfinance institutions. Approximately 80 percent of those who live in low-income countries and have disabilities do participate in the informal sector through self-employment. However, the World Bank estimates that the remaining barriers to the economic inclusion of this group reduce global GDP by 5% to 7%.
The obstacles preventing people with disabilities from accessing formal financial services include: (1) lack of education; (2) discrimination; (3) inadequate training of staff of financial services providers; (4) regulatory frameworks that fail to incentivize FSPs to design services for people with disabilities or to foster greater “access [to] and usage of adaptive financial technologies;” (5) lack of access to mobile phones - particularly smartphones; and (6) shortage of data to assess the needs of people with disabilities and to create and monitor programs and policies to address those needs.
Among the actions noted from the National Financial Inclusion Strategies are: (1) expansion of Kenya’s National Development Fund for Persons with Disabilities; (2) lowered tills and access ramps in financial institutions and social welfare offices in Uganda; (3) documents offered in braille, sign language translation and ramp installations in bank branches as well as job quotas for people with disabilities in Pakistan; and (4) tactile features added to paper currency in the Philippines.
In closing, the authors suggest three measures: (1) increasing access to assistive financial technologies; (2) gathering data classified by type of disability, age and gender to improve policies and product development; and (3) developing government plans targeting the three dimensions of financial services: access, usage and quality. As part of this process, the authors emphasize the importance of engaging people with disabilities - and representative organizations - in all phases of the strategies: design, execution and monitoring.
This is a summary of a paper that the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) published in November 2023. The authors are Adriana Carolina Armos Cuesta, Isabela Pradere da Silva Ramos, Daniel Ricardo Meza Rodriguez, Diana Schvarztein and Robin Newnham.
Summary by: Renata Samadova
