Art Appraisal Blog

Since the onset of the pandemic, the low- and moderate-income (LMI) segment had a direct impact on their day-to-day life. We reflect through Kabita, an LMI customer in Bangladesh, on the barriers LMIs faced during the pandemic and how DFS nudged them towards building resilience.

The report discusses what the LMI segments know, understand, and feel about the COVID-19 outbreak and examines its effect on them. The report also highlights actionable recommendations for policymakers to design suitable interventions that can help the LMI segment cope better in this difficult situation

MSC conducted a research study to assess what the low- and middle-income (LMI) segments in Uganda understand about COVID-19 in terms of awareness, preventive measures being taken, gender dynamics at play in their households, and the use of digital financial services during this time. We present our findings in this report.

The Report "Responsible Practices to Address Seven Major Risks in COVID-19 Digital Financial Transfers" identifies seven heightened risks resulting from the speed and scale of COVID-19 digital transfer responses.

This note describes how the Indian state of Bihar addressed the policy challenges to implement a cash transfer program for migrants and the lessons it holds for India and globally.

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.

New or scaled-up COVID-19 social assistance in the form of cash transfers now reaches nearly 1.1 billion beneficiaries, one in every six people in the world. In a new CGD policy paper, we draw on early evidence from selected countries on the use of digital technology to implement these government-to-people (G2P) social transfer programs.

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.