Measuring Delivery, Usage, and Gender Aspects of Digital Financial Services
Approximately 75 percent of the global adult population has an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider. However, 1.4 billion adults do not have a bank account, with vulnerable populations like women and the poor having particularly low levels of access to formal financial services. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is working to bridge this gap by expanding access to and usage of digital financial services (DFS). This work is led by the BMGF’s Inclusive Financial Systems team.
AIR will serve as the measurement and insights partner to the Inclusive Financial Systems team's work on effective ways to deliver DFS, increase adoption of these services by individuals, and boost women’s engagement with DFS.
Our research team will set up and maintain measurement, evaluation, and learning systems to assess the effectiveness of delivery, usage, and gender programming across countries, including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Uganda.
AIR's role includes:
- Supporting the team in refining theories of change and indicators used to track outputs and outcomes stemming from delivery, usage, and gender investments;
- Setting up and facilitating the implementation of a measurement plan to comprehensively track these indicators;
- Conducting deep-dive evaluations to measure innovation and impact of select investments, using a combination of comprehensive mixed methods and lean data approaches (i.e., approaches to impact measurement) for these studies; and
- Collecting, synthesizing and disseminating learnings from all the above-mentioned strands of work to inform DFS programming by BMGF, its partners, and other stakeholders.
By collaborating on this project, AIR will strengthen the monitoring and evaluation capabilities of partners and local stakeholders, and measure innovation and impact of a wide range of DFS programs across diverse settings.
