The financial inclusion sector has made significant progress on access. More people than ever hold accounts, use digital payments, and can access credit. But access alone doesn’t protect a small business owner in Lagos when floods shut her street for three weeks, or a street vendor in Delhi when a heatwave keeps customers away for a month. The next frontier for financial inclusion is resilience: not just whether people have financial tools, but whether those tools work together to help them withstand shocks, adapt, and recover.

In this episode, we’re joined by Anindita Chakraborty, Director of Research and Strategy at the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), to unpack two landmark pieces of CFI research: the Small Firms, Big Impact study, which surveyed over 20,000 MSEs across Addis Ababa, Delhi, Jakarta, Lagos and São Paulo, and the Building Resilience Capital brief, which makes the case for a more integrated approach to how financial services are designed and delivered.

Episode Themes

1. What small firms are actually facing, and the reality of running a business under pressure
2. The predictable sequence small firms fall back on when a shock hits, and what it reveals about the financial system
3. Why fewer than 2% of the businesses surveyed relied on insurance
4. The fragmentation problem across savings, credit and insurance, and what shared infrastructure could look like
5. Digitisation as a resilience tool, and why adoption still lags in markets like Jakarta and Addis Ababa
6. Treating resilience as an investable form of capital rather than a downstream outcome of access
7. Where the sector needs to go in the next five years to make resilience a genuine outcome rather than a stated goal

About Our Guest

Anindita Chakraborty is Director of Research and Strategy at the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), where she works closely with CFI’s leadership team on strategy, fundraising, and the organisation’s research agenda. She is an inclusive finance specialist with eleven years of experience across research, ratings, client protection certifications, and programme implementation in Asia and Africa. Before joining CFI, she worked as an evidence and insights fellow at the UN Foundation’s Digital Impact Alliance, and has previously worked with Dvara Finance, M-CRIL, and the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. Anindita holds an MPA in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Learn More

For those that wish to learn more about the topic discussed in this episode, see here:

• Building Resilience Capital: The Missing Layer in Outcome-Oriented Financial Inclusion
• Small Firms, Big Impact Study
• Financial Inclusion Week

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Financial Inclusion Unlocked is produced by SIJ Media and hosted by Jack Farren.