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Watch as our team takes you through the design of a basic
app in CommCare
Financial Inclusion Programs
Financial inclusion programs provide access to and delivery of basic banking services, including savings, lending, insurance, and other financial services, to everyone in the population — especially those who live below the poverty line.
Financial inclusion is an important issue in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where limited access to education, communications services, and financial services can pose significant challenges. Barriers to inclusivity in remote settings, such as distance from a financial service provider, lack of trust in financial service providers, low financial literacy rates, or the high cost of making low-value transactions,are all serious obstacles.
The use of mobile technologies is growing exponentially in LMICs, and digital financial inclusion has never been more possible than it is today. Many donors, iNGOs, and governments have identified it as one of the key enablers for sustainable economic growth by allowing the unbanked to attain financial services and break out of the poverty cycle.
Benefits of Mobile Data Collection in Financial Inclusion
Mobile tools can help beneficiaries formalize and track their business information in real time, including sales, inventory, and invoices.
CommCare can integrate with Mobile Network Operators payment systems, ensuring access to mobile money systems that accelerate financial inclusion.
Multimedia capabilities (available in multiple languages) can support beneficiaries with educational financial planning content.
CommCare supports sophisticated messaging integrations that can deliver customized and targeted messaging to financial inclusion program beneficiaries.
Featured CommCare-Based Financial Inclusion Projects
UNCDF – Financial Education Platform
West Africa
UNCDF is using CommCare to help financially educate more than 23,000 youth in The Gambia, Guinea, Niger, and Senegal.
USAID – Mobilise! Project
India
Saving Money is a mobile application available in Hindi and English, built to empower Indian women financially.
UNCDF – CommBanane Project
Senegal
UNCDF is using CommCare to help smallholder farmers to track their business data while derisking them when they access finance.
UNCDF – Financial Education platform
West Africa
United Nations Capital Development Funds (UNCDF) is actively working to leave no one behind, especially youth and young girls. Through a market system development approach, UNCDF help financial sector of least developed countries to be more inclusive: among other activities, in The Gambia, Guinea, Niger, and Senegal, UNCDF supports Financial Service Providers (FSPs) to design, develop and test financial and non-financial services (e.g. financial education) to finally increase financial inclusion and facilitate job creation, especially for youth. Financial education is particularly important in building youth competencies and helping them through their financial decision making.
Together with the FSPs partners and Dimagi, UNCDF has supported CommCare-based application to provide financial education to the last mile: trainers and youth ambassadors use the platform to animate sessions targeting the most vulnerable (e.g. potential migrants, young women, youth living in rural areas, and the poorest youth). Young leaders are even able to log into the application on their own devices to review lessons and replicate learnings within their communities. The program has kicked off in 2019 with 500 peer leaders and trainers and is at scale expected to support more than 23,000 beneficiaries in the four countries of UNCDF’s youth finance portfolio.
USAID – Mobilise! Project
India
Dimagi is the recipient of a direct award from USAID in India. The Mobilise! Project aims to design a primary health care system-led response to domestic violence and to develop recommendations for how such a response can be supported through mobile technology. Female users of the application can access modules built to support them in improving their knowledge on empowerment related topics, specifically financial empowerment. Saving Money, the mobile application we developed in Hindi and English, contains different media-based modules to help them with specific financial planning advice, including Financial Empowerment and Setting saving goals.
UNCDF – CommBanane Project
Senegal
In 2019, Dimagi was granted funding by United Nations Capital Development Funds (UNCDF) to build a business case for Financial Services Providers (FSPs) like Baobab in Senegal to further develop, test, and validate our service offerings and data products targeting smallholders farmers, specifically on banana crops.
UNCDF wanted to explore how data-driven decision making and new dimensions of information could reduce the risk of lending to the youth segment, in particular those working in agriculture, by providing alternatives for those who do not have traditional credit records. UNCDF has partnered with Dimagi and Baobab Sénégal (BS) to pilot the CommBanane application in the banana value chain to reduce the information asymmetry between agro cooperatives and FSPs when it comes to lending decisions. CommBanane has reached up to 500 smallholders farmers active in the banana value chain in rural Senegal. The cooperatives have been able to track their business records and accessed specific credit services adapted to their needs. Baobab Senegal has been able to assess the loan requests through our web platform, allowing better visibility on their lending decision making while reducing operational costs.
Learn more about CommCare
Learn how the world’s most powerful mobile data collection platform can help your program
More than 2000 projects across 80 countries rely on CommCare for their mobile data collection and reporting needs.
“We are ready to design
applications that are everything
from simple and straightforward to
those with challenging and unique
designs and use cases.”
- Ted Barlow, President
“CommCare gave us the ability to
control the experience of our fieldbased
data collectors, which
drastically reduced human error.”
- Bhawna Mangla, Senior Research Associate
“Thank you for helping us to
gather data, refine programming,
and spread the message about our
impact in fighting global climate
change and extreme poverty.”
- Sarah Baird, Executive Director