2.5 billion people lack access to financial services. A new CARE report looks at lessons from eight innovative projects to connect poor people to banks and financial institutions using mobile phones and other means.

Governments, donors, and international financial institutions across the globe have increasingly recognised that access to financial services can play a pivotal role in poverty alleviation and in decreasing the vulnerability of poor people. Though never part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set in 2000, financial inclusion as an issue has moved up the agenda of emerging and developing countries, including at the G20 in 2011 and through the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which led to 35 emerging and developing countries’ central banks committing themselves to financial inclusion in 2012.

Yet 2.5 billion people remain financially excluded. In most developing countries, more than two-thirds of the adult population has no access to formal financial services, and in sub-Saharan Africa, financial exclusion is as high as 76 per cent. Exclusion is typically highest amongst women, youth and the very poorest segments of society.

CARE has pioneered an approach that meets the need for microfinance at the very bottom rung of the world's economic ladder.

CARE Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) empower women to pool their savings – with no outside capital – and then make loans to each other to start small businesses or pay for important life expenses.

Read more about our VSLA approach, along with other best practices at work in Africa, in CARE's most recent report: "Microfinance in Africa: Bringing Financial Services to Africa's Poor."

CARE has pioneered an approach that meets the need for microfinance at the very bottom rung of the world's economic ladder.

CARE Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) empower women to pool their savings – with no outside capital – and then make loans to each other to start small businesses or pay for important life expenses.

Read more about our VSLA approach, along with other best practices at work in Africa, in CARE's most recent report: "Microfinance in Africa: Bringing financial services to Africa's poor."