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1 For details, visit https://ufa.worldbank.org/en/partners.

2 Inclusive business is defined in the International Finance Corporation (IFC) glossary as private sector approach to providing goods, services, and livelihoods on commercially viable basis, either at scale or scalable, to people at the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) by making BOP part of the value chain of Clients’ core business as suppliers, distributors, retailers, or customers.

3 IFC’s official definition for base of the pyramid is “a market segment composed of all people with income below $8 per day in purchasing power parity or who lack access to basic goods and services.” Typically, income data are not available, so we use proxies to define the base of the pyramid, and then assess whether a significant portion of the project is targeting that population. These proxies for the Financial Institutions Group include loan size, mortgages affordable to the bottom 40 percent, access to a bank account for the first time, employment as smallholder farmers or in the informal sector, and so on.

4 Embedded finance is the integration of financial services or tools—traditionally obtained through a bank—within the products or services of a nonfinancial organization. Examples include e-commerce platforms providing working capital to merchants selling through the platforms, or loans provided to retailers or restaurants using data from business management applications that they are using for orders, inventory, payments, bookkeeping or other functions.

5 See, for example, Krijnsen, Eugénie, Bauke Sprenger, and Jeroen Crijns. 2023. “Challenging Assumptions to Chart New Growth.” PWC Global. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/publications/embedded-finance-challenging-common-assumptions.html. According to these authors, “embedded finance is now central to innovation and future growth in the financial industry.” See also Harris, Matt, Adam Davis, Blake Adams, and Jeff Tijsesen. “Embedded Finance: what it Takes to Prosper in the New Value Chain.” Bain & Company. https://www.bain.com/insights/embedded-finance/. According to this article, “The rise of embedded finance marks a new era, not only for banking transactions but also for how consumers and businesses build and manage relationships with financial services more broadly.” Also see Dresner, Andy, Albion Murati, Brian Pike, and Jonathan Zell. “Embedded Finance: Who Will Lead the Next Payments Revolution?” McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/embedded-finance-who-will-lead-the-next-payments-revolution. The authors assert: “The value of this integrated experience for customers helps explain why embedded finance reached $20 billion in revenues in the United States alone.”. According to these authors, “embedded finance is now central to innovation and future growth in the financial industry.” See also Harris, Matt, Adam Davis, Blake Adams, and Jeff Tijsesen. “Embedded Finance: what it Takes to Prosper in the New Value Chain.” Bain & Company. . According to this article, “The rise of embedded finance marks a new era, not only for banking transactions but also for how consumers and businesses build and manage relationships with financial services more broadly.” Also see Dresner, Andy, Albion Murati, Brian Pike, and Jonathan Zell. “Embedded Finance: Who Will Lead the Next Payments Revolution?” McKinsey & Company. . The authors assert: “The value of this integrated experience for customers helps explain why embedded finance reached $20 billion in revenues in the United States alone.”

6 See https://www.miga.org/project/airtel-mobile-commerce-0..

7 See https://www.miga.org/project/erste-bank-ad-novi-sad.

1 The World Bank Group defines financial inclusion as the use of financial services by individuals and firms (World Bank 2020). As of 2022, the Bank Group used the following description: “Financial inclusion means that individuals and businesses have access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs—transactions, payments, savings, credit[,] and insurance—delivered in a responsible and sustainable way” (World Bank 2022a).

2 See Center for Financial Inclusion’s 2019 Digital Finance Evidence Gap Map (https://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/digital-finance-evidence-gap-map) and World Bank 2015a.

3 The Global Findex equates the percentage of people who have a mobile money account with the percentage of its survey respondents who reported personally using a mobile money service to make payments, buy things, or send or receive money in the past year.

4 The Global Findex is unable to quantify the rural access gap: “But precisely quantifying the urban-rural gap is difficult. Defining what makes an area rural is complex—should the distinction be based on population density, on the availability of certain services and infrastructure, or on the subjective judgment of the interviewer or of the respondent? These definitional issues become more challenging when applied across economies—what might be considered rural in Bangladesh or India, for example, might be considered urban in less populous economies” (Demirgüç-Kunt et al. 2022, 28).

5 Reflective of this, the structured literature review found that where disaggregation was possible, the impacts of gender-specific program features focused on women’s empowerment were larger than those of features focused solely on access to financial services (Chliova, Brinckmann, and Rosenbusch 2015; Peters et al. 2016).

6 The Independent Evaluation Group identified digital financial services projects based on their use of digital technologies to deliver financial services or their objective to create conditions for the delivery of financial services using digital technologies.

7 An estimated 1.3 million Colombians and 28 million Brazilians received new accounts related to government payment initiatives (Qiang, Rutkowski, and Pesme 2022).

8 We were unable to verify estimations of the actual achievement of unbanked people who gained access to a transaction account resulting from Bank Group support. For example, the International Finance Corporation estimates that it met or exceeded its goal of enabling 600 million unbanked people to gain access to a transactions account. We could not use the International Finance Corporation’s estimate because it was based on an estimation of the incremental reach indicators in the 25 universal financial access countries that do not explicitly distinguish reach to excluded populations. Instead, to estimate the number of excluded people reached by its portfolio, the International Finance Corporation used the Global Findex–based country percentage of excluded population. We could not find the rationale to assume that this proportion should match the clientele of supported financial institutions and services.

9 We did not directly evaluate the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, but its use and role in Bank Group financial inclusion work emerges in inputs such as country case studies.

1 This pertains specifically to pillar 2A—fast-track credit enhancement to financial institutions for working capital financing to micro, small, and medium enterprises; corporates; and individuals.

2 Development policy operations can extend development policy financing as loans (development policy loans), credits (development policy credits), or grants (development policy grants).

3 Through 2014, World Bank Group country strategies were known as Country Assistance Strategies or Country Partnership Strategies. In 2014, the Country Partnership Framework replaced the Country Assistance Strategy and Country Partnership Strategy.

4 Gender mainstreaming is defined in the Philippines Country Gender Action Plan and includes the equal representation of women and men in the design and implementation of key activities, availability of sex-disaggregated data, and presence of gender focal persons in the project team. Going forward, the World Bank will implement the recommendation that projects enhance their initiatives for more in-depth analysis of sex-disaggregated data and strengthen the link with the broader gender policy of the government implementing agency.

1 In this chapter, we assess success at the project and objective levels using portfolio analysis of the Independent Evaluation Group validated or evaluated projects within scope. For the analysis, we considered indicators with an “above the line” rating (that is, those rated satisfactory or moderately satisfactory) to be successful and assigned them a value of 1. We considered those “below the line” (that is, those rated not achieved or mostly not achieved) to be unsuccessful and assigned them a value of 0. Then we calculated the average success rate per project and objective. The calculation encompassed all output and outcome indicators with available ratings within each project but excluded objectives found in fewer than four projects. A project may have multiple objectives. In particular, we coded 293 evaluated projects for effectiveness, and they had 322 financial inclusion objectives. Because there is no validated evaluation system for World Bank advisory services and analytics, there are no accepted data on its effectiveness. Consequently, advisory services and analytics are not treated in this chapter.

2 Access is the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency’s only identified objective in the financial inclusion domain, but only one operation with an access objective has been evaluated. It was successful.

3 In general, it is difficult to compare the success rates of International Finance Corporation investments, which bear private commercial risks, with other types of World Bank Group projects. It should be noted that a 69 percent success rate is well above the institutional average for all investments, which in 2021 had a three-year rolling average rating of 58 percent.

4 For the portfolio review, we included only government-to-person projects when they had a clear financial inclusion objective.

1 Work quality is an assessment of the quality of work at project entry and supervision as reflected in agreed results frameworks for World Bank Group projects validated by the Independent Evaluation Group. For example, good International Finance Corporation work quality for project preparation would be reflected in such criteria as “clearly stated objectives with realistic project outcomes and impacts; appropriate mix of components or activities needed to achieve intended objectives; proper market or needs assessment; proper identification of project risks and proposed mitigation; [and] identification of appropriate and highly committed counterpart” (World Bank 2013, 105). Thus, the evaluation references evidence derived from the Implementation Completion and Results Report Reviews, Expanded Project Supervision Reports, Project Completion Reports, Project Evaluation Reports, and Evaluation Notes.

2 Complementary to this, our econometric analysis found that government capacity (as rated in Worldwide Governance Indicators) was positively related with success, whereas country income level was negatively related with success.

3 All Bank Group activities relating to Myanmar have been on hold since February 1, 2021.