Values and attitude

Values

This toolkit was produced in the cultural context of UNDP’s Accelerator Labs. It draws inspiration from their culture of deep listening, immersion within the everyday reality of the Global South, and respect for grassroots innovation, openness, and epistemological humility. It does not seek to provide turnkey solutions, but to share the knowledge accumulated along the way, in the hope of making the task of delivering financial tools digitally a little less difficult.

Support and enhance grassroots approaches

Most people in the Global South do not have bank accounts, and are generally not served by traditional basic financial services. Many communities have found ways to produce functionally equivalent financial services: for example, the Accelerator Labs have documented forms of community savings. Rather than treating these approaches as an indcation of backwardness, we recommend looking to these forms of grassroots finance as collective intelligence, and, where the potential is there, build upon them. A good example is the digital version of sanduk sanduk, a form of community savings group used in South Sudan.

Focus on the “last mile” of finance

Financial networks span the planet, but, in the Global South, they are sparse. This toolkit focuses on the “last mile” of financial inclusion, where communities that might be harder to serve for traditional providers of financial services get connected to global networks. Financial literacy is a major enabler of inclusivity, and the UNDP Accelerator Labs have accumulated substantial experience in this area.

Digital cuts both ways

Fintech entrepreneurs have used the potential of digital ecosystems to build new financial services on top of the existing ones. This is exciting, but its very efficiency risks leaving further behind those who are financially and/or digitally excluded. The Accelerator Labs have prototyped ways that these exclusionary dynamics can be overcome with interventions such as making digital payments in neighborhood stores. In a last mile context, the most important part of digital finance is analog.