What needs to take place in order for digital finance to put more money in the pockets of rural women and men in poor countries? This is the question UNDP and partners are exploring through R&D.

Digital financial inclusion can unlock new sources of income and value, even within informal networks, as a contribution to economic development. And beyond individual access to financial services, we’re exploring how digital finance unlocks the latent value of the collective. For example, enabling informal self-help savings groups to digitize their records creates credit scores that can be used to access financing from formal financial institutions such as banks.

We’re driving R&D to answer related questions such as:

Across Africa, UNDP Accelerator Labs are digitizing community traditional saving groups and financial transactions of informal entrepreneurs, often women and young people who live and trade across borders. The Labs run tests with private sector partners, apply ethnographic methods to better understand how networks use digital mobile wallets on the continent.

In South Sudan, the UNDP Accelerator Lab partnered with the country’s first mobile company m-Gurush to create a first-of-its-kind digital fintech group wallet now reaching 1.6 million people in country. UNDP Argentina’s Lab empowered people living in rural areas to use digital payments and conduct online administrative processes via a network of neighborhood stores called Red Con Vos (“Network with You”). Through these and other collective experiments, the UNDP Accelerator Labs have been working in more than 60 countries using digital tools for driving financial inclusion. With newly generated community intelligence, these innovations are ready to go global.