Case Studies
Education and Access to Finance for Persons with Disabilities in Cambodia:
BFFI founder members Paul and Alison collaborated on a four-year project by Chamroeun Microfinance Plc and NGO Good Return in Cambodia, to provide financial literacy education and access to micro-loans to support people with disabilities to run their own businesses.
The project aimed to create a model of disability-inclusive financial services that other FSPs could follow, incorporating:
-
inclusion of people with disabilities in design and delivery;
-
accessible financial literacy coaching;
-
a tailored microloan product for people with disabilities;
-
training Chamroeun’s staff on disability awareness;
-
adapting branches for accessibility
-
developing an action plan to mainstream disability inclusion across all of Chamroeun’s operations.
The learnings from the project were used to produce a disability inclusion manual for other FSPs to follow. Find out more about the project, and stories from people with disabilities who participated, by following this link.
.jpg)
©Chamroeun Microfinance plc.
Presentation at Sector Workshop on Disability Inclusion for FSPs, Phnom
Penh Cambodia 2023
Engagement between FSPs and Organisations of People with Disabilities (OPDs) to advance financial inclusion of people with disabilities:
In 2014, the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI) at Accion International partnered with v-shesh (an impact enterprise co-founded by BFFI founder member Shashaank) and three microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India, in a project for the inclusion of persons with disabilities as borrowers.
A key insight was that, while FSPs and OPDs agreed people with disabilities remained deeply excluded from access to financial services, they had had virtually no engagement or dialogue with each other. Similar feedback about the lack of engagement between FSPs and OPDs was received in a project on financial literacy training by v-shesh and the CRISIL Foundation.
In this context, OPDs have an important role in building trust between people with disabilities and regulated FSPs, as well as counselling FSPs about the physical and other barriers that hold back people with disabilities from accessing financial services.
By focusing on building relationships of mutual trust with OPDs, as well as making accommodations for accessibility, the MFI partners in the project have included almost 100,000 new customers with disabilities as borrowers. Find out more about the project findings here.
© v-shesh / CRISL.
Accessible Financial Literacy coaching for People with Disabilities
Louie Voice: enabling access to online banking through voice commands:
Louie Voice is an SDK that can integrate with any app in the world (Android & iOS) and enables users to do end-to-end transactions with just voice commands. Louie Voice founder Pramit Bhargava, being visually impaired, built Louie Voice to solve his own personal challenges.
Louie Voice is currently being implemented to voice-enable 22 transactions in 8 different languages for a Bank customer, offering access for people with visual impairments as well as a user-friendly interface for all customers.
Pramit and Louie Voice’s Senior Marketing Manager Shikha joined BFFI founder members Paul, Shashaank and Alison for a panel discussion “Accelerating Financial Inclusion of People with Disabilities: the Transformative Power of Digitalisation”, featuring a demo of Louie Voice, as part of the ACCION Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI) Financial Inclusion Week (FIW) 2023. View the online discussion here, and find out more about Louie Voice here
Banner for panel discussion “Accelerating Financial Inclusion of People with Disabilities: the Transformative Power of Digitalisation” at ACCION CFI FIW 2023