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Resilience for All: Why Inclusive Finance Can’t Wait

Topic : Others

This paper calls on everyone working on increasing resilience – funders, policymakers, financial institutions, and other development stakeholders – to leverage inclusive finance to enhance the reach, speed, and impact of their work. The world faces urgent challenges as risks intensify and interconnect, amplifying vulnerabilities, especially for low-income populations and small and medium enterprises (MSEs). If left unaddressed, these vulnerabilities can create ripple effects that have national, regional, and global consequences.
National and international resilience strategies have made strides through government interventions like social protection and infrastructure investments. While these government-led solutions continue to be essential, there is now both an opportunity and a need to go further and to complement these approaches with tools and strategies that empower low-income populations and MSEs to build their own resilience.
The paper outlines why inclusive finance is an indispensable component of resilience responses:
- Inclusive financial services—savings, credit, insurance, and digital payments—allow low-income people and MSEs to anticipate, adapt, cope with, and recover from adversity, whilst building long-term adaptive capacity in response to stresses and uncertainty.
- Leveraging inclusive finance boosts the effectiveness of national resilience policies and programs by ensuring resources reach those in need quickly, safely and at scale. By empowering people to build their own resilience, inclusive finance eases the strain on government resources.
- Integrating inclusive finance into resilience-building efforts can create more inclusive, adaptive, scalable, and sustainable solutions that align with broader development goals.