Tackling financial inclusion

By David L. Shrier
Associate Fellow & Programme Director, Leadership & Diversity for Regulators

I’ve just flown back from Kigali, Rwanda and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion’s Global Policy Forum, spending time with our students from Oxford’s Leadership & Diversity for Regulators, a programme that helps central bankers and finance ministry professionals to understand how to shape policy interventions that promote financial inclusion for women. In collaboration with Women’s World Banking, Oxford Saïd faculty Renée Adams, Dimitrios Tsomocos, Joel Shapiro, and Paul Fisher, as well as the World Bank’s Leora Klapper, joined me in delivering the on-campus portion of this curriculum in May.

It was exciting to see the progress the students have made since January to create, develop, and implement policy interventions that will help shape the next several decades of economic development. About one in every three women aren’t formally able to access the financial system, or even digital infrastructure (the GSMA estimating there is a gap of 200 million women with mobile phones vs. men in emerging economies). Even in countries with relative parity on financial access, men tend to get more loans and larger loans than women. According to the IFC, for example, in Kenya women run 40% of the small farms but only get 10% of the business loans.

Simple math tells us that you can’t grow your economy as well if you leave half of it without the means to purchase goods and services.

Enter our 33 programme participants from 14 emerging economies, who came to EGrove Park this past spring in pairs — a midcareer, high-potential woman, as well as a more senior executive from the same organization acting as a mentor (could be either a man or a woman — about 25% of our participants were men).

We saw a wide range of diversity in terms of infrastructure and capabilities across the different participating countries, not to mention a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. What we shared was a common purpose to drive an economically sustainable model of financial inclusion to help power up the global economy. I found they had an imperative for equality of access and opportunity, not entitlement. Quotas, for example, were less well received by our participants than creating opportunity for merit-based advancement, echoing the lessons of Prof. Adams’ work studying the Norwegian experiment and similar efforts.

The interventions our students have begun implementing in their countries range from full-blown microcredit loan guarantees and public/private partnerships, to better data acquisition using computational social science design around targeted action, to creating better career opportunities within the central bank itself. What united the group was a passion for problem-solving and an eagerness to shape the future of their countries with the assistance of Oxford frameworks and pedagogy. As one graduate said to me, “What I learned at Oxford I will use in every policy I create in my career.”

Dean Peter Tufano conceived of this programme several years ago together with the head of Women’s World Banking, and it’s been a privilege to guide its evolution as we head into our second year. If you know of government officials in emerging economies (men or women) interested to solve this issue, find out more.