Blog

Measuring Financial Health: Findex Broadens Its Scope

Financial health is rising on global agendas, but measuring it remains fragmented. The 2025 Global Findex expands coverage across four key dimensions, offering a step toward global benchmarks while balancing local realities.

Building Resilience: Women, Solar Energy & India’s Turmeric Economy

Women do 80% of the labor in India’s turmeric value chain, much of it grueling and manual. Solar dryers and peelers could ease this burden, improve quality, raise incomes, and build climate resilience with support from green finance tools.

Breaking the Cash Habit: The Urgent Need to Accelerate Digital Merchant Payments

In the latest blog in our Findex series, we look at the importance of accelerating digital merchant payments and what is needed to move Sub-Saharan Africa from potential to momentum.

What the New FATF Travel Rule Means for Financial Inclusion

While new FATF updates aim to combat money laundering, financing of terrorism, and fraud, they also raise important questions about how implementation will affect financial inclusion. We offer analysis on Recommendation 16 (or the 'Travel Rule').

From Access to Impact: It’s Time to Realize the Full Promise of Financial Inclusion

Part of CGAP’s new series on the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025, we draw from CGAP's and Accion's work to highlight six opportunities that need to be prioritized to unlock a golden opportunity for embracing growing digitization to shift financial inclusion from access to impact.

Banking on Progress: Why the Next Chapter of Financial Inclusion is so Important

New data from the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 reveals significant progress on financial inclusion. But while much has been achieved, challenges remain and new solutions are needed to help reach the last mile and to unlock the power of financial services for development.

The FATF’s Revised Travel Rule: Key Changes for Payment Transparency

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recently adopted a revised travel rule for payments and value transfers – known as Recommendation 16 (R.16). The adoption of the rule raises some important questions – why was this revision required and what is the scope of the changes?

Digital Payments Are Changing Women Entrepreneurs’ Lives—What’s Next?

CGAP’s Impact Pathfinder shows that uptake and use of digital payments can benefit women-owned micro and small enterprises by reducing barriers to entrepreneurship, enabling business growth, and promoting financial security.

Rethinking Impact Measurement and Management: Fit for Outcomes

Too often, impact measurement focuses on what’s easiest to track, rather than what’s most useful for decision-making. We challenge conventional approaches to impact measurement and management (IMM), offering a practical way forward: use cases that align IMM strategies with investment context, purpose, and outcomes goals.

Celebrating 30 Years of Collaborative Impact

CGAP is 30. We reflect on the progress made in advancing the lives of people living in poverty through financial inclusion over the past 30 years, and what comes next.

Tailored and Systemic: Navigating Climate Risks With Market-Aligned Responses

Climate risks pose challenges for vulnerable communities, FSPs, and their supporters. Understanding these risks—and how public and private actors can respond—is key to advancing climate adaptation and building resilience.

Four Ways Funders Can Support Climate-Smart Women’s Financial Inclusion

Inclusive finance is a critical, yet underutilized, tool for supporting low-income women’s climate adaptation, and funders can play a key role by helping FSPs overcome key barriers to delivering climate-smart, gender-responsive financial products and services.

Revised FATF Guidance on Inclusion Finalized

The FATF just adopted a revised version of its guidance on anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) and financial inclusion. Several other updates came out of the meeting, with implications for financial inclusion work - CGAP offers an analysis of these updates.

How Can Financial Authorities Use Gender Data to Fulfill Diverse Mandates?

As the financial landscape grows more complex, integrating gender into regulatory data will help financial sector authorities fulfill their mandates more effectively, contributing to a more inclusive, responsible, safe, and sustainable financial sector.

Financial Services are the Key to Gender-Inclusive Carbon Markets

As carbon markets evolve from niche climate interventions into a multi-billion-dollar industry, a critical truth is emerging: gender inclusion is no longer optional. It is essential to the permanence, equity, and scalability of carbon projects.

Implementing Gender-Smart Strategies: A Guide for Financial Providers

Financial institutions often neglect the specific needs of women, despite evidence showing women are valuable clients. We advocate for a gender-sensitive approach to financial inclusion to address these issues and improve women's economic potential.

Unpacking Effects of Gender Norms on Women's Financial Lives in Uganda

How do gender norms impact not just women’s behavior, but the behavior of all market actors in the financial system? Recent findings from Uganda offer some insights.

When Does Financial Education Work Best? Evidence-Based Insights

CGAP’s Impact Pathfinder consistently identified financial education as a factor for the uptake and use of financial services, prompting us to ask: Could it be playing a more central role in what works, for whom, and in what circumstances?

How Digitization Is Disrupting Collateral-Based Lending

Data is upending traditional lending models and can broaden access to finance.

The Hidden Costs of Forex Funding: Do Women Pay a Higher Price?

Smaller lenders serve women borrowers best but face high costs, forex risk, and limited scale. In light of this fact, donors and DFIs must expand local currency funding and strengthen risk management to close the gender gap in finance.