Dear members,

Welcome to the new Rural Finance and Investment Learning Center (RFILC) website and newsletter!

We would like to highlight two main novelties that you can explore while navigating your new platform. First, we now have a 4th library pillar that is dedicated to all aspects related to agricultural investments. Second, the platform offers new features to signed members including the ability to perform a custom site search, to suggest new content and to receive recommendations tailored to your member profile information.

In today’s newsletter we will tickle your mind with two interesting documents. First one is the toolkit developed by USAID entitled “The Firm to Farm Finance Toolkit: Hearing, Creating & Delivering Human-Centered Solutions for Inclusive Access to Finance” which provides step-by-step guidance on how to apply a framework to hear client needs and create and deliver financial products and services for low-income households in a sustainable and client-centric manner.

The second highlight is the UNCDF study on “Digital Financial Services in Africa: Beyond the Kenyan Success Story”. The paper explains the success factors of digital financial services (DFS) in Kenya and contrasts this with the challenges and opportunities for DFS in seven countries: Benin, Cameroon, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia. The study is based on the Mobile Money for the Poor (MM4P) methodology developed by UNCDF to assess the market potential for DFS.

We wish you a pleasant exploration of our new RFILC website and its new features!

Best regards,

The RFILC editorial team