InSPIRE
Informal Sector Policy Interventions and Research Engagements
Sessions Hosted by Dvara Research
2024
Seasonal Hunger and Risk Coping: Preliminary Evidence from Malawi
Date: September 17, 2024
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The consumption smoothing problem is complex, creating scope for errors. We posit that because potential expenses are typically more numerous, varied, and irregular than income, this can generate systematic bias—leading individuals to over-estimate their available resources and consequently under save. The resultant planning fallacies can be exacerbated in situations where annual income is derived from a single harvest and spend it down the year. Previous evidence in Zambia show that farmers consistently underestimate expenses up to 50% lower than their actual spending. Drawing on insights from the memory and planning fallacy literatures, we randomize an intervention that induces individuals to think through their budget set and formulate a spending plan. Treated individuals immediately increase their perceived future expenditures by 20-60%, and lower their willingness to pay for discretionary consumption by 34%. In the two months after the intervention, treated households decrease expenditures by 15%; they subsequently enter the hungry season—the final months of the year when consumption is at its lowest—with one additional month of savings, leading to a smoother spending profile over the year. They also self-finance additional investment in their farms, resulting in a 9% increase in annual crop revenue at the end of the year. In a scale up version of the project in Malawi we test out various ways in which farmers adjust to this realization, where they are arrive at more accurate estimates of their expenditure and income, including adjustments in the labour market, increase demand for risking mitigation and preference for instruments like index insurance. The talk will focus more on the scale up results in Malawi which explores numerous ways in which farmers adjust to the intervention and the limitations of placing the onus of improvements precisely on farmers themselves.
Does Long-term Access to Microcredit Lead to Women Empowerment? Experimental and Quasi-experimental Evidence from India
Date: August 20, 2024
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In this paper, the authors examine the impact of long-term access to microcredit on women’s intra-household bargaining power and consequently women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation. The hypothesis is whether long-term access to microcredit leads to women’s empowerment crucially depends on whether there is an improvement in their intra-household bargaining power or not. We adopt a quasi-experimental methodology involving a statistical matching technique to identify the impact of long-term access to microcredit on women empowerment. In partnership with an India-based financial service provider, the authors matched comparable long-term and new female microfinance clients using coarsened exact matching. They conducted behavioural experiments with the female clients and their spouses to assess the relative intra-household bargaining power of women as a potential mechanism for women empowerment. They find that long-term access to microcredit does not improve women’s intra-household bargaining power and therefore consequently does not have any significant impact on women’s empowerment. They also find no significant improvement for the long-term microfinance female clients on parameters such as likelihood of being self-employed, engaging in paid work, and influence over borrowing decisions. Finally, the authors do not find any significant positive downstream effects of long-term access to microcredit, measured using a multi-dimensional poverty index. They attribute these results to the potential mechanism of women’s intra-household bargaining power as household development outcomes improve significantly when women are in control of household resource allocation.
Self-help Groups in Rajasthan: Impact on Socio-economic Status of Rural Women
Date: July 23, 2024
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In developing countries, Self-Help Groups (SHGs) have been profusely acclaimed as a development intervention to transform the social-economic status of poor women. This research has two objectives. One, to generate evidence, whether in comparison with young groups (less than 1 year old), mature SHGs (more than 8 years old) have improved the socio-economic status of women across the different geographical and agro-climatic zones in the State of Rajasthan? Two, to generate evidence for policy makers on how SHGs can be utilized as a development strategy to improve the socio-economic status of women and empower them. This research has deployed a mixed methods approach to collect qualitative and quantitative data through document review, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and household survey of 2400 SHG members. Significant difference between the young and mature groups was reported on primary responsibility to fetch drinking water, several aspects of women empowerment, income from livestock, average income, average savings, loans from non-SHG sources and loans from SHGs. This evidence underscores that SHGs have paved the way for social and economic empowerment, yet more is to be achieved.
Dark Patterns in a bright world
Date: June 25, 2024
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‘Dark patterns’ are consumer targeted marketing strategies that capitalize on cognitive biases of consumers, propelling them to make decisions contrary to their intended preferences. The term dark patterns, coined by user designer Harry Bignull, has gained traction recently, due to its correlation with psychological responses that are produced through nudges that are unaligned to the consumers’ original preference. The consumer responses elicited through the use of such dubious nudges have a direct correlation with the way the human brain functions. These covert strategies employed by digital marketing platforms capitalize through behavioural science, aimed at their economic growth compromising the consumers’ free, fair, and independent decision-making capacity. The use of these algorithmic strategies to drive businesses has multiple legal tangents with a direct bearing on competition, contract, privacy, and consumer law. The speaker shall discuss the manipulation employed by companies to economically disempower consumers’ as well as highlight the erosion of decisional privacy of the consumers, a phenomenon that overtly seems to be an exercise of free will but is a tacit capitalization of cognitive biases of consumers spurring them to in advertently take actions against their preferred interest. Finally, the speaker shall critically analyse the policies of the Indian Government to curb the menace of dark patterns and analyse their efficacy.
Gender-Based Discounts on Taxes related to Property: Role in Encouraging Female Ownership- a Case Study of Indian States and Cities
Date: June 11, 2024
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Several states in India have put tax incentives and other preferential treatment measures in place, mainly to encourage female property ownership but also in an attempt to improve revenue collections due to improved compliance. The talk will summarises the findings of the paper ‘Gender-Based Discounts on Taxes related to Property: Role in Encouraging Female Ownership- a Case Study of Indian States and Cities’. This paper attempts to explore whether gender-based tax incentives in annual property tax and stamp duty and registration charges, two of the largest sources of tax revenues for Indian cities and states respectively, influence the pattern of property ownership and increase tax revenues.
Talk on the book - A political theory of money
Date: April 30, 2024
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Understanding money’s nature as political, institutional, and material answers today’s big money questions. Money remains a foundational question of social theory. What is money? Why does something so insubstantial have value? How do money systems make promises function like valuable things? Why are money systems always hierarchical yet variable? The answer, the book argues, is politics. Money is institutionalised social power. Politics generates institutions that differentially lock into the future product of political and economic collectives. Money emerges from the institutionalisation of social antagonisms to encapsulate a collective’s productive potential in a flexible, tradable instrument. This takes a system. Money is built in hierarchical layers out of the inherently variable material of politics and at various economic scales. This book outlines these variable processes theoretically and through case studies.
The Promise and Harms of Digitizing Credit: What Does the Evidence Say?
Date: April 16, 2024
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Finance’s rapid digitization has sparked debate on balancing the potential for transformative development with the risks of misconduct and consumer abuse. Mobile Instant Credit: Impacts, Challenges, and Lessons for Consumer Protection, produced by the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) in collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, synthesizes evidence from rigorous impact evaluations and descriptive studies on the impacts of digital credit, with a focus on Mobile Instant Credit (MIC): small, consumption-oriented digital loans. This talk will explore the evidence on the relationship between the digitization of credit and development, providing insights that may inform the development of new products.
Balancing Acts: Safe Withdrawal Rates in the Indian Context
Date: April 02, 2024
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Estimating a rate of withdrawal for a retirement portfolio that will not lead to its premature exhaustion is one of the key questions that besieges a retirement planner. This rate is commonly referred to as the Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR). Following a landmark study by Bengen (1994), the most widely used SWR is 4 percent- however, this SWR pertains to the financial markets in the United States. There has been no systematic study on what the SWR is for India. In this talk, we would like to take you through our study which attempts to fill this important lacuna.
Estimating a suitable SWR for the Indian financial markets in challenging. Compared to the more developed financial markets, the Indian markets are young. This presents two problems. First, there is limited historical data to work with, and second, the data present is not stationary, i.e., it exhibits structural changes across different time periods. Accordingly, this study estimates the SWR for India using simulation on historical data.
The often cited 4 percent rule is not appropriate in India’s context; rather a range between 3.0% and 3.5% is more appropriate. Our analysis reveals that while portfolios with higher equity allocations can potentially increase safe withdrawal rates, they also significantly increase the risk of portfolio failure, particularly for withdrawal rates greater than 3.75%. Taxes on fixed deposit interest act as significant drags on the failure rates of `safe’ all deposit portfolios. In addition, we highlight the importance of gold as a diversifying asset, which can mitigate some market-related risks in traditional two-asset class portfolios.
Households using finance to manage consumption
Date: March 19, 2024
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With an aim to increase healthcare access for poor households, many state and national governments, in India, have introduced free health insurance programs. At more than 50%, India has one of the world’s highest out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure rates. It is then a puzzle that the utilization of many of these programs remains low. We study the role of informal risk-sharing networks in explaining insurance-adoption behavior in the context of the Arogyasri – a pioneering health insurance program introduced in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. Households are more likely to adopt if they belong to an informal network. We argue that households adopt the insurance only if they expect positive net benefits from adoption and informal networks facilitate by reducing individual heterogeneity and uncertainty in costs associated with adoption but not covered by the insurance. We then estimate whether access to the insurance changes the utilization of institutional healthcare, the intended goal of such programs. We find that people switch from public institutional healthcare to private healthcare although this has no overall impact on health outcomes.
Public Private Partnership in healthcare – who adopts and who can access?
Date: March 05, 2024
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With an aim to increase healthcare access for poor households, many state and national governments, in India, have introduced free health insurance programs. At more than 50%, India has one of the world’s highest out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure rates. It is then a puzzle that the utilization of many of these programs remains low. We study the role of informal risk-sharing networks in explaining insurance-adoption behavior in the context of the Arogyasri – a pioneering health insurance program introduced in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. Households are more likely to adopt if they belong to an informal network. We argue that households adopt the insurance only if they expect positive net benefits from adoption and informal networks facilitate by reducing individual heterogeneity and uncertainty in costs associated with adoption but not covered by the insurance. We then estimate whether access to the insurance changes the utilization of institutional healthcare, the intended goal of such programs. We find that people switch from public institutional healthcare to private healthcare although this has no overall impact on health outcomes.
Talk on the book ‘Money: A Zero-Sum Game’
Date: Feb 20, 2024
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Money, an indispensable part of our lives, determines our economic well-being. In any economy, money is an asset to “we the people” who own it and is a liability for the institutions that owe it. While establishing that money, thus, is a zero-sum game- there are no winners in this game without losers – the book explains how the money game is played. Understanding this zero-sum game is crucial as each one of us is a participant in this game.
Even Nobel economists – as recent as in 2022 have confined the primary role of banks to financial intermediation. In contrast, we posit banks primarily to be significant money creators in an economy, using a novel framework that we introduce in the form of a fundamental equation, the Vaidya Subbu equation.
Using this framework, the book not only dispels a widely perpetuated myth that only the central bank can create and control money but also establishes that it is, in fact, the banking sector that creates and controls money in most economies, including India. The book argues that the banking sector is more central to the macroeconomy than perhaps even the central bank, thus entrusting it to be a key contributor in catalysing economic growth.
60 Decibels’ 2023 Microfinance Index Report – Methodology, Metrics, and Findings
Date: Feb 6, 2024
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The talk will cover 60 Decibels’ Microfinance Index. Our belief— validated by our partnership with most of the world’s leading microfinance investors, networks, and institutions—is that the best way to answer central questions is by listening, at scale, to microfinance clients. This presentation will broadly cover our overall methodology, metrics, and key findings through this annual initiative.
State of Working India 2023: Social Identities and Labour Market Outcomes
Date: Jan 23, 2024
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Presentation of the main findings from the recently released State of Working India report. The full report as well as Executive Summary are available at cse.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.
Digital Readiness of States for Direct Benefit Transfer of Fertiliser Subsidy
Date: Jan 09, 2024
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Unlike other forms of subsidies, the fertiliser subsidy is provided directly to manufacturers and not to the farmers, allowing inefficient production units to thrive in the system. The Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers convened in 2020 called for a new framework for subsidy distribution. An index has been created to explore the digital readiness of states to transition to Direct Cash transfer to Farmers.
2023
Are Frauds-Awareness Campaigns Effective? Some Experimental Results
Date: Dec 12, 2023
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It is highly likely that many of us have received dubious text messages or calls offering the chance to earn a reward or warning us of an impending financial loss. The person on the other end often tries to persuade us to share personal information to either receive the reward or avoid the financial loss. Unfortunately, those who are convinced and divulge their sensitive information often end up being defrauded. Such instances are known as social engineering fraud. The primary payment system exploited by fraudsters in these scams is UPI (Unified Payments Interface). The features that make UPI popular among users also make it vulnerable to exploitation by fraudsters.
To mitigate social engineering fraud in UPI, policymakers have focused on awareness campaigns. As a result, we set out to study the effectiveness of these awareness campaigns in raising awareness about UPI fraud and reducing the incidence of fraud. The study unearthed the limitations of these campaigns in informing users about their behavioural dispositions that are often exploited by fraudsters. We also uncovered how the campaigns did not inform users about the post-fraud recourse mechanism available to them.
In our presentation, we will explore the results of our study, highlighting the shortcomings in current awareness campaigns targeting UPI fraud and suggesting improvements.
Climate Risk and Financial Inclusion: A regulatory perspective on risks and opportunities
Date: Nov 28, 2023
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Climate change poses risks to the real economy. This may drive a retrenchment of the financial sector away from serving the least profitable and most climate-exposed clients, namely low-income, rural households, and micro, small, and medium enterprises. Moreover, new reporting and disclosure requirements for increased environmental due diligence, along with other necessary regulatory actions, can unintentionally exacerbate financial exclusion if they are not implemented with a risk-based approach. Inclusive green finance policies can enhance financial stability by creating a more resilient real economy and reducing the risks facing the financial sector.
Political incentives and the welfare state: the case of healthcare.
Date: Nov 14, 2023
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The role of politics in health prioritisation and in balancing disease prevention, health promotion and treatment is recognised. What is less understood however are the political incentives that, amongst competing priorities, drive priority to health. Priority to healthcare has varied across countries and across India’s sub national political regimes, leading to diverse healthcare reforms and health status. Tracing the evolution of such reforms highlights the nature of political incentives motivating leaders to prioritise health.
An analysis of these incentives and how they may be shaped, surfaces three broad insights. One, political ideology can be a motivation driving attention to health, but in its absence, political leaders often seek political legitimacy through attention to healthcare. Two, incentives can be created by external actors – civil society, citizen movements, media – by shifting the source of political legitimacy and highlighting schisms in the social contract between political regimes and citizens around healthcare, creating incentives for the attention to health. Sensitizing politicians to electorally rewarding policies can motivate action. Three, state capacity is a key variable in the confidence to undertake health reforms and the choice of reforms.
FINANCIAL MATTERS & MOTIVES: Insights into the various lives of gig workers
Date: Oct 31, 2023
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A study that provides insights into gig workers’ income patterns, financial needs and key motivations, and identifies how broader ecosystem actors can help address challenges faced by the segment.
Findings of the inquiry into psychological factors that influence redressal-seeking behaviour
Date: Oct 03, 2023
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Funded by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), researchers at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC) at Ashoka University in India conducted qualitative interviews and surveys to evaluate the impact of intrinsic factors such as locus of control, self-efficacy, and fatalism on how women consumers manage redress issues with their digital financial services providers. The speakers shared the results of this qualitative and survey-based inquiry into the psychological factors that influence redressal-seeking behaviour. The research questions, hypotheses, survey design, predictors and outcomes, and correlational analysis has been discussed.
India’s Statistical System – Past, Present, Future
Date: Sep 05, 2023
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Once the envy of the world, India’s statistical system has decayed over time, and is facing growing questions from within and outside the government today. This talk was based on a recent Carnegie Endowment working paper on this subject, and it tried to trace the factors that drove the rise and wane of this system. It drew lessons from the past to outline a path towards reforms.
Is gig work a boon, bane, or both a boon and a bane? Exploring the financial lives of gig workers in Bangalore
Date: Aug 22, 2023
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The Economic Impact of Social Organization: Empirical Evidence from India’s Self Help Groups
Date: Aug 08, 2023
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A large number of financial policies embed economic exchange in Microfinance and Self Help groups that comprise a small number of members from very similar socio-economic backgrounds. Consumption growth may, however, require more expansive networks that promote “vertical” ties across households that differ in socio-economic status. Using data from India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission, a program that supports federations of SHGs, we provide empirical support for this hypothesis.
Unpacking user-centricity of the MFIN Customer Redress Mechanism (MFIN-CGRM)
Date: Jul 25, 2023
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How Do Borrowers Respond to a Debt Moratorium? Experimental Evidence from Consumer Loans in India
Date: June 27, 2023
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Debt moratoria that allow borrowers to postpone loan payments are a frequently used tool intended to soften the impact of economic crises. We conduct a nationwide experiment with a large consumer lender in India to study how debt forbearance offers affect loan repayment and banking relationships. In the experiment, borrowers receive forbearance offers that are presented either as an initiative of their lender or the result of government regulation. We find that delinquent borrowers who are offered a debt moratorium by their lender are 4 percentage points (7 percent) less likely to default on their loan, while forbearance has no effect on repayment if it is granted by the regulator. Borrowers who are offered forbearance by their lender also have higher demand for future interactions with the lender: in a follow-up experiment conducted several months after the main intervention, demand for a non-credit product offered by the lender is 10 percentage points (27 percent) higher among customers who were offered repayment flexibility by the lender than among customers who received a moratorium offer presented as an initiative of the regulator. Overall, our results suggest that, rather than generating moral hazard, debt forbearance can improve loan repayment and support the creation of longer-term banking relationships not only for liquidity but also for relational contracting reasons. This provides a rationale for offering repayment flexibility even in settings where lenders are not required to provide forbearance.
Insuring India: Reflections on the PM-JAY story so far
Date: June 13, 2023
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India’s PM-JAY program, a flagship initiative that aims to provide cashless hospital coverage to 500 million people, is approaching its fifth anniversary. This presentation reflected on key design features and scheme performance so far, including global experience with Universal Health Coverage (UHC) reforms. Focus topics included beneficiary identification, benefit design, managing finances, and accountability. Special attention was paid to the challenge of scheme implementation in a heterogeneous federal context. Some thoughts on possible future directions for system strengthening have been discussed.
Examining how new-to-UPI users use UPI apps: Behaviours, challenges, and solutions.
Date: May 30, 2023
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The session presented insights from our study that examines how new-to-UPI users use UPI apps. It focused on the most dominant use cases, the frequency of usage, biggest apprehensions and grievance seeking behaviour across three groups- women users, migrant workers, and gig workers. The study builds on the quantitative data gathered from 262 respondents in Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, further substantiated by 25 in-depth interviews and usability tests. Our findings provide insights for thinking about UPI apps as a vehicle for digital financial inclusion.
Rethinking “Untapped” Value: Trust and Extraction in Commercial Microfinance
Date: May 16, 2023
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Microfinances (MFIs) have accomplished the historic task of gaining the trust of a huge swath of the Indian citizenry in order to provide formal financial services. Yet today, these firms center the strategic interests of shareholders, while extracting maximum value from working class women borrowers who can ill afford the terms and costs. This talk explored the gendered financial structure of MFIs and suggest just pathways forward, building on MFI accomplishments and also brought focus on gender and livelihoods back to the center.
Billion Users: Interpreting insights for solutions
Date: May 02, 2023
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Series of depth focused research on billion users can lead to product frameworks bringing multiple stakeholders to work towards a shared goal of product development impact. The talk covered the story of how women from rural and semi-urban regions in India build their digital proficiency with the intent of earning income as a case study in product framework. This framework summarises how actionable insights are not just converted to solutions but also contributes to larger product frameworks that teams can leverage for faster decision making. Then we had an enriching and interactive discussion on how to leverage/ apply research insights for solutions and a consulting approach to contextualise actionable insights for tech companies and startups.
Risk Barometer in Digital Lending – Towards Better Customer Protection
Date: Apr 19, 2023
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India’s fintech lending industry has grown rapidly since 2014, with the evolution of new models and approaches to lending. This rapid growth offers the potential for many upsides in the form of easier access to much needed credit and including hitherto excluded consumer segments who may not have the ability to prove their ‘creditworthiness’. In India, as in other parts of the world, the growth in digital lending has been accompanied by a variety of risks. Some of these risks – such as over-indebtedness, data privacy, poor market practices of aggressive marketing and collection, and pricing – have long been associated with lenders and need to be addressed as a market conduct issue. To better understand the multitude of risks the Indian fintech lending industry faces, the Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE) and CFI partnered to conduct a risk barometer study. The resulting fintech lending barometer report is the first attempt at identifying how risks are perceived by various stakeholders associated with the fintech lending industry in India and is a crucial first step to documenting how risks evolve.
Two Studies on Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) Products
Date: Feb 21, 2023
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This talk combined two recent papers looking at Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL). First, Benedict presented his paper “Buy now, pay later (BNPL)… on your credit card“ and discussed BNPL more broadly. The paper uses transaction data to document the growth of BNPL in the UK. It shows that consumers charge their BNPL to their credit card: especially younger consumers and those in more deprived areas. Next, Paul presented his recent experimentlooking at interventions to improve consumer comprehension of BNPL terms and conditions during online purchases. The paper shows how relatively small changes to the consumer journey can help improve customer understanding of BNPL, and to some extent, reduce BNPL use.
Putting Citizens First: Designing Tech Systems for Social Protection, Three Case Studies
Date: Feb 07, 2023
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States across the country are rapidly adopting open digital ecosystems for social protection (SP-ODEs) to deliver social protection benefits to citizens. This session provided a snapshot of the findings from Dvara Research’s two-year-long project on SP-ODEs. Through this session, the presenters unpacked the concept of SP-ODEs and delve into the reasons for building them. Further, building on Dvara’s existing knowledge of exclusion in digital social protection and digital finance, the presenters described the risks associated with deploying SP-ODEs and presented a citizen-centric framework that helps in surfacing risks in live SP-ODEs and providing guidance on mitigating them. As a proof of concept, the presenters shared findings from applying this framework to three actual SP-ODEs
Bank Sakhis – women agents empowering rural communities
Date: Jan 24, 2023
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The talk was about the role of cash-in cash-out (CICO) women agents in empowering their communities to avail financial services. The presentation covered the global context of agent networks and their role in distributing financial services, the Self-Help Group ecosystem in India and Bank Sakhis who are drawn from self-help groups, as a growing presence of rural business correspondent agents, and a few findings from an in-depth research carried out in Bihar, India in 2022.
Digital Financial Inclusion and Women Entrepreneurship
Date: Jan 10, 2023
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The talk described how digital financial literacy and digital business tools could prove to be transformational for women and women-owned micro and small enterprises in India. The audience learned about the World Bank program on digital financial literacy in India and the pilot that the team is doing with a local Trade Union (one of the biggest in India), teaching women entrepreneurs about digital bookkeeping.
2022
Can information disclosures influence life insurance purchase decisions?
Date: Dec 13, 2022
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Life insurance is an important financial tool that allows households to manage financial risks arising from the death of an earning member. Yet, in 2019, life insurance penetration (percentage of insurance premiums to GDP) was only 2.82%. While 38.3% of Indian households reported having a life insurance product as on September 2021, life insurance covered only 1.2% of the mortality protection needs of the country. Among those who do own a life insurance policy, traditional life insurance plans such as endowment plans (bundle of insurance plus investment) are much more prevalent than term life insurance plans (pure risk protection product). However, endowment plans are unsuitable due to poor returns, low life cover, and high penalty charges. We study the role of effective information disclosures in steering households towards buying term life insurance over endowment plans. We focus on information disclosure as a solution as we believe that it is the first of many steps required to ensure suitable product sales for customers. Through a lab-in-the-field experiment, we test three types of information disclosures and their impact in influencing customer’s willingness to purchase an endowment plan. We find that mere accurate disclosures that inform customers about realistic returns are not enough to change people’s habits. A change in habit requires offering multiple options based on accurate and complete disclosures, so that customers can benchmark returns and other features and make an informed choice that is more suitable to their needs.
Measuring customer outcomes in financial consumer protection: Lessons from pilots in South Africa and Uganda
Date: Nov 29, 2022
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According to CGAP, a “customer outcomes-based approach” to consumer protection focuses on the experiences and results of a customer’s access to and use of financial services, which are consequences of a financial service provider’s products, delivery, conduct, and practices. This presentation briefly goes over the main components of such an approach, and then summarizes the implementation steps of a pilot exercise that focused on measuring and monitoring intermediate customer outcomes from a supervisory perspective, as well as the lessons from the experiences by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and five providers in South Africa that participated in the pilot. The presentation also shares key lessons from the application of the measurement framework to a savings product offered by a Ugandan provider, considering Bank of Uganda’s financial inclusion goals.
Diagnosing Gendered Social Norms Can Unlock Pathways For Achieving Women’s Financial Health Outcomes
Date: Nov 01, 2022
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Gendered social norms have critical bearings on women’s access to resources, whether it be skills, business knowledge or access to capital; and their financial behaviours – how they plan, save, spend, or borrow. Understanding these gendered norms can provide critical data and contextual cues for designing women-centric financial systems. With this premise, UNCDF’s financial health programme partnered with CGAP and FinEquity’s peer learning program “Social Norms Diagnostic Co-Lab” to integrate social norms diagnostics into our learning framework that examines how social norms affect women’s financial health in specific contexts. In this talk we will explore the need to diagnose gendered social norms in research and design of financial solutions, and identify ways of unboxing women’s potential to inspire design.
Financial Inclusion of Bharat: Research on Who, What and How
Date: Oct 18, 2022
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Between 2018-2022, CIIE.CO undertook over 24 studies under the theme of financial inclusion in India. These studies were diverse in their research questions, focus areas and approach. The recently published book “Financial Inclusion of Bharat: Insights into People, Markets and Startups” consolidates the key insights from these studies. In this talk, Dr. Sharma will primarily touch upon three themes: (a) how CIIE nudged the founder’s empathy for the target customer through the stories of the People of Bharat, (b) on-ground research that leads to product building – here the talk will highlight some data-backed insights into specific user segments such as rural household and gig workers, and (c) what it takes to build and scale a startup that serves low and middle income customers.
Family Accord, Kin Taxes and Borrowing: The Financial Choices of Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong
Date: Sep 20, 2022
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As economic migrants, Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong often articulate the goals of their migration in financial terms. However evidence suggests considerable heterogeneity in whether they succeed in achieving these. We study their reported and actual financial behaviours, and how they interact with pressure to share cash with family members. Consistent with prior research in other contexts, we find strong evidence that outstanding loan repayment obligations help to resist financial demands from family members. Possibly for this reason, indebted migrants are generally willing to reveal an unexpected cash in-flow to their family members. Instead, those who mainly rely on saving to build investments are more likely to use strategic sharing of information as a tool: they report in surveys that they would conceal an unexpected in-flow but would reveal a loan. Both groups have larger savings than their counterparts who are either non-strategic in how they share information, or conceal all information. The findings shed light on the channels through which a migrant’s relationships with family members can influence their migration success.
Learnings on grievance redress systems from international experience
Date: Aug 23, 2022
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Grievance redress mechanism (GRM) is an essential component of the consumer protection framework in the financial sector which allows a consumer to seek remedy against the wrongs of the Financial Service Providers. While there could be various forms of GRM (both judicial and non-judicial), in this report, we study the design of a non-judicial redress agency. The report studies the critical organisational decisions faced in the design of a redress agency, namely — manner of establishment, governance, funding, dispute resolution processes, and performance evaluation. We build on the principles-level and practical guidance literature along with case studies from four international redress agencies. The report attempts to add value by assimilating all the varied resources to map principles, options, and case-studies to provide an accessible yet comprehensive introduction to designing a GRM for a varied readership
The promise of NLP and social media to monitor consumer complaints
Date: July 26, 2022
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The digital lending app market has grown substantially in the past several years and, especially over COVID, so have concerns about consumer risk for those who use these apps. Digital finance apps have certain challenges in terms of market monitoring, but also significant advantages, particularly in the frequency and amount of complaint data that is generated online, such as through Google Play Reviews and Twitter. The challenge has been to develop the techniques to use all this rich data to make sense of the nature and patterns of the complaints over time. Natural Language Processing is a key tool to help us do that. In this talk from Decodis, a tech-led research firm specializing in NLP and sociolinguistics, shared experiences in developing NLP tools to understand the digital lending app market over the past two years.
Reforms to make finance inclusive for women
Date: July 12, 2022
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The talk focused on certain legal and policy reforms that may be made in some of the existing and proposed Indian laws, to make finance more inclusive for women enterprises, and for women in general. The reforms relate to women enterprises and creating more avenues for credit flow to them, expanding the reach of banking services to women and suggestions to add a gender lens to the financial services being offered by various financial service providers.
Last Among Equals: Making Panchayats Responsive to Citizens
Date: Jun 28, 2022
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This talk, drawing from Dr. Sharan’s book Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar’s Villages, dealt with how power concentrated in entrenched elites in village societies can be distributed better to those on the margins. He also argued that change — ephemeral, incremental or transformational — is possible, through government policy and collective action.
Social Health Protection in India: Challenges and Possibilities
Date: Jun 14, 2022
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India has witnessed rapid increase in the legal social health protection (SHP) coverage of its population over the last decade. Two of the largest public institutions responsible for this are the ESIC and the PM-JAY. Together, these two institutions cover more than 50 percent of India’s population. While historically distinct in their organization and approach, they face common challenges – of scaling up service delivery, sustaining federal cooperation, influencing health-seeking behaviour among the insured population, aggregating existing demand and cumulatively, demonstrating contribution to India’s Universal Health Coverage agenda. The speaker will discuss some of the challenges and possibilities of this SHP landscape, based on his recent work.
Lessons from a 30-month immersive financial capacity building initiative for women in Rajasthan
Date: May 31, 2022
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The case for targeted initiatives to bridge financial inclusion gap for women has been made out quite copiously in the literature. However, limited number of such initiatives exist in practice. From July 2017 to December 2019, CUTS International implemented immersive financial capacity building initiatives targeting women in Bhilwara and Chittorgarh districts of Rajasthan. The initiative covered all the 673 village councils and consequently 23 blocks of these districts. Over a period of 30 months, 140 cluster trainings, and 572 periodical meetings were organised, with the help from 180 primarily-women community based facilitators, resulting in 9,395 direct beneficiaries. A lot of lessons emerged from approach, experience, challenges, and findings of the initiative, have been discussed in the presentation.
Building Gender Responsive Digital Information Systems – A case study of digitizing SHGs
Date: May 17, 2022
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Starting December 2020, IT for Change has been working on a project that digitizes the records of SHGs (self-help-groups) which serve as both, financial intermediaries for micro credit access and social support structures. The project involved making a series of recommendations highlighting the different ways in which information systems could be made more gender-responsive. The recommendations spanned the entire data lifecycle, focusing on potential risks in techno-design and institutional choices and ways in which the system may be leveraged to further women’s empowerment. This presentation provided a summary of this study, highlighting the importance of thinking “gender by design”.
Covid-19 and Bengaluru’s Urban Poor- Key Findings from the Azim Premji University Bengaluru Covid Impact Survey
Date: Apr 19, 2022
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Azim Premji University, in collaboration with nine Civil Society Organizations, conducted a survey of 3,000 households in 92 low-income settlements across 33 wards of Bengaluru. The survey was done to estimate the continuing impact of Covid-19 induced lockdowns and economic disruptions on employment and livelihoods. The survey also captured information on access to government support as well as coping mechanisms. The findings show that livelihood impacts of the pandemic have persisted far beyond the lockdowns. The long period of depressed earnings, lower food intake and debt/sale of assets will hamper the ability of households to recover from the pandemic unless more support is provided. Relief measures have had a mixed record of reaching the urban poor.
Insights from CGAP’s Market Monitoring Toolkit to advance Financial Consumer Protection
Date: Apr 05, 2022
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Digital financial services are not only expanding financial inclusion to underserved and low-income consumers, but also exposing them to new and heightened risks. Market monitoring can help financial and consumer protection authorities identify, understand, and track consumer risks, behaviors, and outcomes, and act promptly. This talk presented CGAP’s market monitoring toolkit, which aims to provide authorities with practical guidance for selecting and implementing individual market monitoring tools, illustrative country cases methods to start incorporating market monitoring as part of regular supervisory activities. We summarized the main components of the toolkit, and highlight how supervisors and other stakeholders can contribute to the implementation of effective market monitoring, in the context of a customer-centric and outcomes-based approach to consumer protection.
Do Indian financial firms have a robust Grievance Redress Framework in place?
Date: Mar 22, 2022
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A rapid expansion in the Indian financial sector has necessitated a growing focus on improving customer service which also includes the delivery of a robust Grievance Redressal Mechanism (GRM). A GRM is a formal system through which complaints are resolved in a time-bound manner, thus improving public service delivery in the financial system. This paper assesses the GRM policy content that is available on the website of 21 financial service providers in India. The firms include the top three firms by market share in each sector – banking, insurance, pensions, payments, mutual funds, and brokerages. Financial firms differ in their performance across different metrics, highlighting areas for improvement with grievance redress processes with financial services providers (FSP).
Market & regulatory monitoring of overindebtedness
Date: Mar 08, 2022
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Preventing overindebtedness is one of the most difficult aspects of client protection. The reasons are many: preventing it often requires saying no to a client – whether no to the loan amount she’s requesting or no to any loan at all; it means going against the logic of volume – no loan officer or branch manager will ever receive a bonus for lending less; it means going against the intrinsic forces of competition, ceding a client to a more aggressive or less scrupulous competitor; it means going against the often prevailing impulse of borrowers to emphasize the needs of the present and discount the risks of the future; but most importantly, it means setting rules and monitoring for something that is inherently undefined and practically impossible to measure. And where doing this is hard enough at the level of an institution, preventing overindebtedness at the level of an entire market may seem a bridge altogether too far. Yet it can be achieved, and perhaps with less difficulty than one might presume. Building on the work of the MIMOSA project and the market-wide efforts to prevent overindebtedness in Cambodia and elsewhere, this talk explored what financial inclusion actors, including regulators, can do to minimize the risks of overindebtedness and ensure long-term sustainability of low-income credit markets.
The Evolving Nature and Scale of Consumer Risks in Digital Finance: Findings from CGAP’s Global Research
Date: Feb 22, 2022
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Digital financial services (DFS) have been a critical driver of financial inclusion in emerging and developing countries. But in recent years, the emergence of innovative DFS solutions has introduced risks and, in some cases, exacerbated pre-existent risks for vulnerable DFS users, which if not addressed may reverse the progress made in advancing financial inclusion. This talk presented CGAP’s findings on the evolution of the nature and scale of DFS consumer risks. CGAP’s global research reviewed literature and gathered insights from over 70 experts. Based on the assessment of DFS consumer risks in recent years, CGAP has developed a consumer risk typology to simplify the analysis of consumer risks in digital finance. This talk summarized the global research findings and help stakeholders understand the extent of consumer risks in digital finance. It also briefly highlighted CGAP’s solutions, such as the market monitoring toolkit, elevating the collective consumer voice, and the customer outcomes approach to consumer protection that can help to mitigate the risks.
The Experiences of the MFI Sector: How microfinance institutions from India and the world have negotiated the COVID-19 challenge.
Date: Feb 08, 2022
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The microfinance sector has never faced a challenge like the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cases, customer repayment rates touched zero, while providers had to service their own obligations. The period was marked by an acceleration towards digitization, rationalizing human resources, product innovations, and regulatory and fiscal uncertainties. To understand the challenges faced by MFI leaders, and the choices they evaluated and the decisions they made, we conducted long-term “case-style” periodic interviews with CEOs of MFIs, as a part of the Sentinel Project, housed at the Financial Access Initiative. In this presentation, we discussed the findings from India, and a few other select jurisdictions.
What to Think about Financial Health: Findings from the UNSGSA Financial Health Working Group
Date: Jan 25, 2022
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The effort to become financially healthy occupies a central place in the life struggles of millions of families. But the concept of financial health is only now beginning to penetrate the thinking of participants in the global financial inclusion sector. This talk will present the findings of the UNSGSA Financial Health Working Group, convened in 2021 by H.M Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, in her capacity as the U.N. Secretary General’s Special Advocate on Financial Inclusion for Development. The group of experts from business, government and non-profits assessed the level of interest in and knowledge about financial health across the sector and proposed an agenda for making financial health more central to the decision making of policy makers and financial service providers. This talk summarized the group’s findings on the implications of financial health for policy and the private sector, with a special attention to measuring financial health.
Insights from All-India Debt and Investment Survey, 2019
Date: Jan 11, 2022
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The All-India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) conducted by the National Statistical Office is a nationally representative survey of Indian households that collects information about the assets and liabilities of households. The survey is unique in that in provides detailed information about the volume and value of financial and physical assets households own as well as the incidence and source of indebtedness among households. Such an information is useful as it allows us to construct the balance sheet of households, thereby helping us understand the level of interaction households have with the formal financial system. Studying household’s financial behaviour is crucial in assessing the state of access to and use of formal financial services and the progress Indian households have made in their financial inclusion journey. In this talk, we presented key insights from AIDIS, 2019, and paint a picture of the current landscape of Indian household finance.
2021
The Fit Factor: Matching Loans & Savings to Cash Flows
Date: Dec 07, 2021
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Typically, when we set out to measure the impact of a loan on someone’s life, we tend to look at what happens after they take the loan— for instance, whether their income increases, whether they are able to spend more on education, or whether they acquire more assets. However, there are a couple of limitations to this approach:
Outcomes data taken following a loan tends to be a snapshot of a certain point in time, and is usually collected at a time pre-determined by the service provider, rather than at a time that makes sense for the borrower in terms of when they expect to see results from the loan
Changes in income and increased spending on education can be influenced by many different factors in a person’s life, not just their access to finance. For instance, we see in financial diary research that unexpected events happen more often than we might think, such as accidents, sudden medical needs, new opportunities, and other events which may disrupt the original plans a borrower had for their loan
While outcomes data is useful, it cannot give us the full picture of the utility provided by a loan or other financial service. What if, in addition to outcomes data, we considered the impact of a financial service from a cash flow perspective? In other words, what if we could see how loans or savings fit with clients’ real cash flows and affect their day-to-day money management? Using data from Stuart Rutherford’s Hrishipara Daily Diaries project, we would like to introduce a new impact measure which looks at how financial services either reduce or add to the volatility of a person’s cash flows. Our working assumption is that services which increase cash flow volatility generally make money harder to manage, and vice versa. We call this measure of impact on volatility the Fit Factor. Link to paper
The KarmaLife Journey: Building New Paradigms in Small Ticket Finance for Non Salaried Workers
Date: Nov 23, 2021
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85% of India’s workforce is non salaried with roughly 100M linked to non-farm organised sectors. These primarily comprise steady, hand-to-mouth earners and spenders, annually churning ~$300B in transaction value. The younger gig segments are also digital early adopters that use digital apps for content, commerce and payments. Yet these workers have little access to financial services simply because traditional financial institutions are unable to assess the real time risk and deliver viable finance in required formats. A combination of workflow digitisation trends, increased smartphone penetration, and public digital infrastructure creates the perfect storm for more appropriate, cash-flow based finance. The talk shared highlights from proprietary research conducted on financial needs & habits of select gig worker segments. It also discussed KarmaLife’s data-driven, credit-first approach to solving this problem, along with some early user and product level insights along the journey. More information on KarmaLife’s solution is available on its website and via these B2B and B2C explainer videos.
Digital Doorstep Banking: Female Banking Agents Lead Digital Financial Inclusion Through the Pandemic and Beyond
Date: Nov 09, 2021
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The business correspondent (BC)–agent banking model in India has proven to be a low-cost, innovative solution to address financial inclusion in rural India. We use a gender and technology lens to explore the role of female banking agents in facilitating access to social security transfers using fingerprint-based biometric authentication solutions during the nationwide pandemic related lockdown in India between March 2020 and July 2020. During the lockdown period, banking agents supported access to government pandemic related cash transfers with dramatic increases in the number of transactions made during this period. Using data from multiple small samples of banking agents, we highlight the on-the-ground challenges observed in the provision of basic banking services to access cash transfers during the pandemic. In the talk, we discussed the case for strengthening the agent banking ecosystem, improving the delivery architecture for direct benefit transfers (DBTs), encouraging competition between banking service providers, and providing demand-based financial products and services to expand gender-focused financial inclusion further.
Financial Inclusion and Economic Growth in India Amid Demonetization
Date: Oct 12, 2021
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Does financial inclusion through opening of bank accounts catalyze economic activity? We use the case study of a large-scale financial inclusion programme in India called Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) to investigate this question. Firstly, we establish that financial inclusion and economic activity share a long-term link. The variables move together and are in a long-run equilibrium relationship. Secondly, we find that the relationship between financial inclusion and economic activity experiences structural breaks clustered around the month in which demonetization of Indian currency was announced. Further, our analysis of causality directions shows that in the period before demonetization, an increase in economic activity causes an increase in the use of banking. Post-demonetization, the direction of the causal relationship between economic activity and banking reverses. An increase in banking transactions now causes a positive impact on economic growth. We discussed the likely channels through which causality operates and the possible reasons for reversal in the causality direction.
Tamil Nadu Agriculture Budget 2021 – Will it Solve Farm Woes?
Tamil Nadu Agriculture Budget 2021-2022 – Perspectives from the ground
Date: Sep 28, 2021
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Tamil Nadu has been known as one of the best states in the agricultural sector since the beginning of the Green Revolution, but its farmers are facing a variety of problems starting from low income to high level of indebtedness in recent times. For the first time in the history of Tamil Nadu, the newly elected DMK government has recently presented an exclusive budget 2021-22 for the agricultural sector, which is a welcome step towards achieving better growth in the farm sector in the future. However, there is a need to look at whether the budget has addressed the core issues of the farm sector. Specifically, we need to see whether the programmes announced in the budget in any way help to reduce the fallow land and increase the cropped area, which are serious issues facing Tamil Nadu’s agricultural sector today. Are the long-term visions mentioned in the budget achievable? Can agri-budget be presented without including the irrigation sector? Will the increase in MSP for paddy solve the long-time woes of paddy farmers? Can the income of farmers be increased through the programmes announced in the budget? What should be done to stimulate the growth of agriculture? I will be covering all these issues in my presentation.
Talk title 2:
Tamil Nadu Agriculture Budget 2021-2022 – Perspectives from the ground Dr. Tannirkulam presented a qualitative discussion on some thrust areas of the budget based on my interaction with farmers, village level agriculture-service providers and traders. There is a push for increased collectivization of farmers and an increase in the share of organic farming in the State. He shared some concerns and opportunities around this highlighted by a dry-land farmers’ group.
Innovations in Health Financing: Dvara’s Health Savings Account (HSA) approach
Date: Sep 14, 2021
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Health financing in India devolves heavily to out-of-pocket expenditures with commercial insurance accounting for less than 10% population coverage. This combined with fragmentation & poor quality on the provider side have contributed to poor health outcomes at a population level and increasing financial vulnerability. Dvara’s new initiative, Health Savings Account, aims to address some key gaps in health financing among the low and middle income sections of the Indian population. We are seeking to build innovative bundles that combine savings, insurance and primary health care. Successful efforts here have the potential to increase financial risk protection and positively impact health outcomes. In the talk, we reviewed the landscape for health financing in India, examine key gaps and share the hypotheses motivating the HSA experimentation.
Delivering services to low income migrant households: Learnings from Chalo Network (and the wider “migration ecosystem”)
Date: Aug 31,2021
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Since the 2020 migrant crisis, effectively delivering public goods and essential services to low income migrant households has been a key concern of governments and civil society across India. However, due to the largely informal, often deliberately clandestine, dynamic and multi-locational nature of migrant lives, little progress has been made on this front. The slow progress in the face of an unprecedented health and labour market crisis, betrays the institutional inexperience and the political economic barriers in engaging with migrant households in India. Addressing this is the centerpiece of the work at India Migration Now and its implementation arm, the Chalo Network, where through a combination of primary and policy design research, strategic partnerships and implementation pilots we have derived metrics for tracking migration along with design principles and approaches for delivering services to migrant households. In this talk, India Migration now has shared some of their key findings from their work delivering financial, identity and welfare services in major migration corridors and locate them in the wider ecosystem push for mainstreaming migration in India.
Financial inclusion through payment transactions – securing the unsecured
Date: Aug 17,2021
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The talk drew attention to the country’s financial inclusion initiative through the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and looks into aspects related to fairness and effectiveness of the use of Basic Savings Bank Deposit Accounts (BSBDAs) opened under the Yojana. We see how on the one hand the country envisages a less-cash society while on the other hand the BSBDA holders had been disincentivised in their digital transactions for day-to-day payments. On a focused note, we showcase the gaps that exists in the regulatory and supervisory responsibility of RBI for the BSBDA users. While having embraced digital means for transacting, the BSBDA customers remained an unprotected lot since few banks exploited this marginalised section of the society through imposition of usurious service charges or creating other impediments like setting unreasonable limits for digital transactions in a month. Towards corrective measures, we give our recommendations. The talk is based on a recent report “Regulating Basic Savings Bank Deposit Accounts— Do we need to care for these marginalized depositors?”
Digital payments for remittances: sharing results from an impact evaluation in India
Date: Aug 3, 2021
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Good Business Lab and the IDinsight financial inclusion team in 2019 conducted an RCT joint project aimed at promoting digital payment tools among female migrant workers in the garment industry in India. We studied the impacts of a workplace program providing training on digital payment applications on the use of such technology for remittances among migrant workers. We find that classroom training increases the use of digital payment applications by about 5 percentage points, and (more expensive) individualized training by 11 percentage points. However, when it comes to using digital payments for remittances, we find the statistically significant impact only for the individualized training with an increase of 7-8 percentage points. In this session, we presented the context, the intervention, and the results of the study, as well as highlighted the main technological and regulatory barriers to adoption.
COVID-19, Cyclones and Crises: Taking Stock of Social Protection Architecture in India
Date: July 20, 2021
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The talk drew on CMIE survey data and experiences from the World Bank’s ongoing partnerships with eight state governments and national government agencies to strengthen cash transfers, social-care and social protection responses to crises. The focus will be on comparing India’s social protection system with experiences from other relevant middle-income countries and identifying a few key areas for immediate emergency response in the context of the second wave of the pandemic in India and potential long-term reforms.
Understanding and Evaluating the CoWIN Platform
Date: July 06, 2021
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Utilising a digital platform such as CoWIN to administer a large-scale vaccination exercise garnered significant attention from naysayers and optimists alike. It is one of the latest example of providing essential public services to citizens via a digital platform. The platform has been designed as a “cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating Covid-19 vaccines”. It has multiple interfaces accessible by various users depending on their requirements. For example, while citizens may access the platform to book vaccination slots, administrators use an administrator-interface to monitor vaccination progress at the back end. Each interface or module performs a specific function in the vaccine delivery chain. Unlike other digital platform, CoWIN was deployed at a large-scale and hence gave us an opportunity to assess it as an ODE designed for digital welfare delivery. During the session, we examined the mechanics of the CoWIN platform and assess it based on the attributes we have developed for a good SP-ODE.
Adoption of banking products by bottom of pyramid consumers: An empirical investigation
Date: Jun 22, 2021
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Vaccine hesitancy, according to the WHO, refers to a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services. With vaccines being a strong part of the arsenal in the global fight against COVID-19, it is the need of the hour to combat any form of hesitancy and encourage vaccine acceptance. Given the growing vaccine hesitancy worldwide, we, at ideas42, are applying behavioral science insights to support and optimize COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, follow-through, and service delivery. While this is an ongoing work and we are at the initial stages ourselves, given the wide interest and relevance of the subject, we would be sharing our research findings and early learnings. During this session, the speakers presented behavioral interventions that ideas42 has designed for implementation in the US and make a case for applying a behavioral approach to overcome the vaccine hesitancy challenge in India.
Using behavioral science to combat COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy – sharing learnings from the ongoing work in the United States and research in India
Date: May 25, 2021
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Vaccine hesitancy, according to the WHO, refers to a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services. With vaccines being a strong part of the arsenal in the global fight against COVID-19, it is the need of the hour to combat any form of hesitancy and encourage vaccine acceptance. Given the growing vaccine hesitancy worldwide, we, at ideas42, are applying behavioral science insights to support and optimize COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, follow-through, and service delivery. While this is an ongoing work and we are at the initial stages ourselves, given the wide interest and relevance of the subject, we would be sharing our research findings and early learnings. During this session, the speakers presented behavioral interventions that ideas42 has designed for implementation in the US and make a case for applying a behavioral approach to overcome the vaccine hesitancy challenge in India.
Analyzing social security schemes – their role and reach during the COVID-19 pandemic
Date: May 11, 2021
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The talk presented and discussed the findings from three rounds of data collected by a collective of 60+ NGOs, called the Rapid Rural Community Response (RCRC). The data has been collected from 11 states. The three rounds were conducted in May-June’20, June-July’20 and Dec’20-Jan’21. To complement the data collected, we conducted consultation sessions with NGOs in some states to understand district level differences and find explanations for trends observed in the data. The objective of the study is to examine the reach and effectiveness of social security schemes, to inform better reach, simpler processes and responsive designing of government schemes. The effort brings together practitioners and researchers to inform policy-making.
Dull Disasters? How planning ahead will make a difference, and other research from the Centre for Disaster Protection
Date: Apr 27, 2021
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The world was not ready for Covid-19. But we could have been. We could have been prepared for the many climate-related disasters, famines, conflicts and global health threats of the past decade. We have the science and expertise to monitor and forecast risks, yet we still treat disasters as surprises. We have the financial know-how to have money in place when disaster strikes, yet households, communities, and even countries still end up passing around a begging bowl. This work harnesses lessons from finance, political science, economics, psychology, and the natural sciences to show how countries and their partners can be far better prepared to deal with disasters. The insights can lead to practical ways in which governments, civil society, private firms, and international organizations can work together to reduce the risks to people and economies when a disaster looms. Responses to disasters then become less emotional, less political, less headline-grabbing, and more business as usual and effective. The presentation will explore a range of solutions that have been implemented around the world to respond to disasters. It will give an overview of the evidence on what works and what doesn’t and it will examines the crucial issue of disaster risk financing and insurance. Building on the latest evidence from around the world, it will present a set of lessons and principles to guide future practice in this area with a particular focus on implications for India.
Government of India’s response to COVID-19 pandemic – A demand-side perspective
Date: Apr 13, 2021
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The talk featured the results from the first two rounds of a demand-side study that MicroSave Consulting (MSC) is conducting. The first round was conducted in May 2020, the second in September 2020, and a third-round is planned for May 2021. The objective of this study is to gauge the demand-side effectiveness of state government interventions during COVID-19, and thereby to help central and state governments improve the implementation of COVID-specific measures to secure the poor and vulnerable from economic shocks. The demand-side study complements the work that MSC undertook in 2020 with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Government of India, wherein the response and readiness of state governments to address COVID-19 was systematically tracked and periodic reports submitted to the MHA with a relative ranking of states and good practices for states to learn from each other. In all, four reports were submitted between April 2020 and July 2020, and widely circulated within the central and state governments.
Financial access of unbanked villages in India from 1951 to 2019: A Spatial Approach
Date: Mar 30, 2021
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How has bank branch expansion changed in pace and coverage with different policies of RBI? We develop a novel measure of financial access at the village level by finding the Euclidean distance of unbanked villages to the nearest village or town with bank branch for each year from 1951-2019. We use this measure of financial access to study different bank branch expansion policies over last seven decades. Particularly, we observe how proximity to banks changes in four different regimes of bank branch expansion—pre-Social Banking Phase (1950-1969), Social Banking Phase (1969-1990), Liberalization Period 1 (1990-2005) and Liberalization Period 2 (2005 onwards). We find that social banking policy led to a rapid decline in distance and, thereby, increased financial access. These gains became restricted from 1990 to 2005 as the policy of mandatory quotas on bank branch opening was withdrawn. However, financial access improved again from 2005 onwards when RBI withdrew service area approach rules on lending in rural markets and introduced incentive-led policies for bank branch expansion. The results suggest that sound, predictable and incentive driven methods can provide both efficiency and equity of public service provision. The possibility to replicate our measure of financial access in other areas of policy is discussed in conclusion.
Online needs offline: Architectures for digital inclusivity Study: Last Mile Access to Urban Governance Study: Restoring Agency: Modified Choice Approach
Date: Mar 16, 2021
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The Last Mile Access research is a year-long empirical, mixed-methods study conducted by Aapti Institute in partnership with Omidyar Network India and eGovernments Foundation. The study explores existing pathways to government services for marginalised citizens in the context of digital platforms. The key takeaway of this study is the role of offline architectures including human intermediaries, processes, and mechanisms that sit alongside tech to amplify reach and access for last-mile citizens.
Delivery of Social Entitlements in India – Unpacking Exclusion, Grievance Redressal, and Role of Civil Society Organisations
Date: Mar 02, 2021
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As a follow-up to our previous work on exclusion in welfare schemes, Dvara Research, in collaboration with Gram Vaani (GV), undertook a study encompassing an analysis of complaints from citizens unable to access welfare benefits and the resolution pathways that were used by GV volunteers to assist such citizens. We covered welfare beneficiaries across seven DBT schemes, MGNREGA, PDS, and Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. The study highlights how a citizen/volunteer navigates the welfare labyrinth across the various administrative tiers of scheme implementation and underscores the need to revisit the design of grievance redress mechanisms in welfare delivery.
Employment Dynamics in Microenterprises during COVID 19
Date: Feb 16, 2021
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The COVID-19 crisis has really tested the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this session, Sharon Buteau discussed interesting insights gathered through a rapid periodic assessment of Indian microenterprises from June 2020 to October 2020 (GAME/LEAD collaboration), to shine a light on how they have navigated challenging circumstances posed by the crisis across multiple business dimensions and employment.
Underground Remittance Networks and Migrant Financial Ecosystems
Date: Feb 02, 2021
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Ecuador has a long history of migrant and refugee reception, where historical trend has grown in the last 5 years with large numbers of Venezuelans choosing to remain and reside in Ecuador. As of September 2020, Ecuador estimates 400 thousand Venezuelan economic refugees living in the country. One of their stories is that of “Nia” a young Venezuelan who participated in the underground financial remittance system made possible by Ecuador’s dollarized economy. In this session, Natalia Espinosa Tokuhama discussed the mechanics of the remittances scheme, as well as contrasted the financial health with that of internal Ecuadorian migrants to the city.
Length of the Last Mile – Delays & Hurdles in NREGA Wage Payments
Date: Jan 19, 2021
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Building on LibTech India’s collective experience of working on NREGA and the three state (Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Rajasthan) survey, LibTech India released a report titled ‘Length of the Last Mile: Delays & Hurdles in NREGA Wage Payments’ in November, 2020. The report is an attempt to document the perspective of the workers in accessing their own wages. In this session, Sakina and Rajendran presented some key observations from the report.
