Art Appraisal Blog

Increasing women's economic empowerment is an important motivation for expanding access to digital financial services for women.

Countries worldwide are using social assistance payments as a component of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This briefing addresses how donors and their partners can design and implement social assistance payments that are efficient and secure while providing recipients with reliable, convenient, and safe access to their payments.

Many countries have launched unprecedented relief packages to cushion the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons from the COVID-19-related scale-up of social assistance can be harnessed by developing countries to rethink and strengthen the architecture of social protection systems in the future.

For government-to-person payments to truly benefit the most vulnerable during COVID-19, they must tackle the inequalities that women are facing due to the pandemic.

Given pre-existing gender gaps, there are concerns about exclusion for many of the social assistance programs being rolled out around the world in response to COVID-19. Social protection systems that ignore gender inequality will likely fail to mitigate the risks of the pandemic for women, and, at worst, could further exacerbate inequalities. Therefore, inclusive economic policies that empower women and create resilience now and for the future must be designed to ensure women contribute to the global recovery. This paper offers guidance and considerations for policymakers to support women’s inclusion and empowerment.

This Briefing provides guidance to policymakers to work with financial sector regulators and implement COVID-19 social assistance payments that facilitate rapid, remote account opening in compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules.

Around the world, women are being hit hard by the economic impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus). As the fallout from the pandemic deepens, so do the short and longer term effects on women's empowerment. The insecurity and lack of social protection that characterize informal, temporary, unpaid labor put millions of women and their families at extreme risk: in many developing countries, most women in paid work were working informally - around 95 percent in Asia and 89 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper summarizes the range of practice across jurisdictions that have employed a combination of SDD (also known as tiered CDD), licensing of non-bank financial institutions, and digital identification to enroll unbanked individuals into financial accounts so that they could receive COVID-19-related relief cash transfers.

Globally, the expansion of social assistance is among the most common public policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge of quickly determining who would be eligible for these transfers highlighted gaps in information about workers in the informal sector and their families and other vulnerable groups. This review of some early international experiences of scaling up social assistance in response to the pandemic reveals the importance of certain ‘assets’ such as a robust digital identification system and other key registries.

There’s a better way to deliver government-to-person (G2P) payments. Modernizing the delivery architecture can increase value for customers, increase customer choice, lower government costs and create competition among financial service providers.