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Most digital financial services users require agents to help them switch between worlds of cash and digital currency. Global evidence suggests six principles for building viable agent networks in rural areas home to poor, financially excluded populations.
Emilio Hernandez, Christopher Blackburn 
Rural agent networks are critical to “last mile” financial inclusion. This reading deck for policy makers does two things: (i) it shows how rural Cash-in/Cash-out (CICO) agent network expansion is key to ensuring poor people can capture the benefits of digital financial ecosystems; and (ii) it presents a set of policies that have been effective in enabling rural CICO in a way that benefits vulnerable segments, like rural women, and...
World Bank Group
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in vast numbers of people in need of social assistance, many of whom were not previously covered by social safety nets. To meet this unprecedented level of need, governments quickly scaled social assistance reaching over 1.7 billion people in low- and middle income countries. Scaling up social assistance presented two separate but related challenges: first, adapting targeting and registration to reach individuals not commonly included in...
Ennatu Domingo, Chloe Teevan
This policy brief outlines why cross-border interoperability of payment platforms across Africa is important, where the opportunities and challenges lie, and how international partners such as the EU can support African efforts. It traces some of the solutions that are being applied both at the continental and at the regional levels, explores some of the lessons to be learned from these different cases, and proposes initial policy recommendations for the...
World Bank Group
Digital technologies are changing how the world interacts and transacts. From opening bank accounts to parents enrolling their children in school and social safety net programs verifying a new beneficiary, to businesses applying for licenses, day-to-day activities are becoming increasingly automated and integrated. Apart from reducing costs and spurring innovation, this creates opportunities to make better services available to more people, such as by removing the need to physically go...
Christina Lowe
This paper discusses the main opportunities and challenges associated with digital social protection, drawing on trends pre-Covid and since the onset of the pandemic. It offers eight lessons to help social protection actors capitalize on technology’s potential in a risk-sensitive manner.
Beatriz Burattini, Camila Rolon, Lucas Sato, Victor Thives, Louisa Wagner
This policy research brief analyses how digitalisation can facilitate rural populations’ access to effective and adequate social protection and economic inclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean. It investigates the region’s social protection response to COVID-19 and highlights three good practices in providing digitalised social protection to vulnerable rural populations during the crisis. Based on this analysis and considering the local obstacles to digitalised social protection in rural areas, recommendations...
