Visa is collaborating with the GSMA Mobile for Development Foundation to launch the Digital Finance for All (DFA) initiative.
This project, set to span five years, targets the promotion of digital financial access for 20 million people, focusing on women, smallholder farmers, and small business owners in developing regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The initiative comes in response to the rising usage of digital payments in low- and middle-income nations, which has increased by 66% since 2014.
Despite this growth, significant segments of the population, including women, smallholder farmers, and small enterprise owners, face substantial hurdles in accessing digital financial services.
For instance, women in these regions are 20% less likely to have a formal financial account, and smallholder farmers, who produce over 30% of the world’s food, often lack access to essential financial services.
The DFA Initiative aims to address these challenges through several key strategies. These include the provision of financial education resources via a mobile literacy toolkit, joint research efforts focused on financial inclusion, the digitisation of smallholder farmers and small enterprises to facilitate their use of digital financial services, and support for financial inclusion among refugees and their host communities.
“At Visa, we believe that digital payments are critical to including everyone in the digital economy by helping provide access to economic livelihood.
Together with the GSMA Foundation, we seek to empower those in underserved communities across the world and provide equal access to help build better financial futures for all.”
said Chiagozie Nwabuebo, Vice President of Global Growth & Social Impact, Visa.
“Mobile money can play a transformative role in advancing financial inclusion and resilience for the nearly 2 billion people who remain unbanked globally.
However, poor digital and financial literacy is a key barrier to accessing digital financial services, especially for certain population segments like women, farmers and micro-merchants.”
said Ashley Olson Onyango, Head of Financial Inclusion and AgriTech, GSMA.
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik