Giving Compass' Take:

• Robert Annibale explains why financial inclusion is essential to achieving the SDGs and how financial services can be expanded to increase access. 

• How can funders work to increase financial inclusion, especially to marginalized groups like women? 

• Read about financial inclusion efforts and poverty. 

Many of us have access to savings tools and credit tools, and sometimes we have insurance tools, and we use those tools to manage the ups and downs of our lives. Those tools help us meet goals, smooth out tough times, prepare for the unexpected. We all have very similar needs, but we don’t all have similar access to these tools.

What drives my interest is financial inclusion. People have needs for all sorts of access: to water, to healthcare, to education. The absence of inclusive financial systems means the most vulnerable people have an even tougher road with fewer options – they are left to rely on products and services that are more expensive, lower quality, less convenient and even predatory. Being excluded from financial services limits your opportunities. If the minister of finance or a poor woman in Bangladesh can access the same national mobile services, shouldn’t they have access to a common formal financial system?

Look at the road system, the infrastructure that we built that connects our communities. In many ways that gives us more access to common opportunities—shared facilities create a shared experience. Professor Yunus and many others around the world gave ordinary people access to services that most of us take for granted. Whether it’s about saving safely for a goal, or it’s about credit for a small enterprise or for a home, or for many other goals people have, it’s so important that we have equitable access.

Bankers aren’t generally thought of as social activists, but bankers come from all kinds of past lives. My work combines social activism and service delivery with the need to be sustainable in a world where it’s a challenge to get funding and financing to do creative things with a social outcome. I’ve felt privileged being able to live in communities where I had opportunities, I had clean water, I had education, I had access to healthcare, but I was very conscious of those who didn’t.

People sometimes ask me what world I would like to create or find myself in. It’s a world where there’s equal opportunity. That means we need to advance concepts like universal access. I believe most people will do much better with a certain amount of security and access. When someone struggles over those most basic elements of life, their potential is very limited. There’s no reason we should allow that as a society or as an industry.

Read the full article about financial inclusion and the SDGs by Robert Annibale at Skoll Foundation.