Art Appraisal Blog

Financial institutions and governments have been working for years to leverage digitized G2P for women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment. COVID-19 has increased the stakes, as governments look to use G2P programs to strengthen women’s resilience. New research from Women’s World Banking offers insights on Indonesia’s PKH program, the country’s largest conditional cash transfer.

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.

The financial impact of COVID-19 has been hitting the poor. Governments are adjusting cash transfer programs and utilizing national payment systems to mitigate these negative impacts. This blog reviews responses from Latin America, Asia and Sub Saharan Africa where governments with limited resources are coming up with innovative solutions to the crisis.

Around the world, cash transfer programs are being implemented by governments in response to COVID-19. Pakistan introduced the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Program, which requires mobile phones and national IDs to register. Using data from the 2018 Financial Inclusion Insights survey, we estimate large gender gaps in mobile phone ownership and national ID possession, leaving women are at risk of being disproportionately excluded from the program. To address this, the government should ensure women are more purposefully targeted, perhaps by reserving more slots for women or prioritizing women's registrations.

Social cash transfers to vulnerable households and individuals have been adopted at an unprecedented scale across sub-Saharan Africa. While most programs initially relied on manual cash disbursements, digital payment technologies have been on the rise since the early 2000s. Through a survey of 130 programs in 44 countries this paper offers a comprehensive overview of payment instruments and providers used in the region. Although cash continues to play a key role in the disbursement of social transfers, the adoption of electronic payments through private companies is increasing and further payment reforms and digitization efforts can be expected.

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.

By 2015, several social safety net programs out of the more than 100 in Bangladesh were experimenting with digital payments, often through a single vendor. But there were more benefits to be gained if programs used a unified government payments platform to consolidate and simplify delivery. CGAP worked with other development partners on a proposal. This is the case study.

This case study documents what drove the Zambian Ministry of Community Development and Social Services to develop an innovative, choice-based digital payments system and how this new multi-provider payments model has worked in practice.

This case study examines how the Inua Jamii program, a program of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, gradually introduced payments digitization, then choice to design a program that has successfully scaled to reach the most vulnerable groups in Kenya.

Advances in payment infrastructure are enabling governments to channel payments through multiple providers, giving people greater choice over how to receive payments. This is an important shift with implications for financial services providers, recipients of government payments and financial inclusion.