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Press Release: ISF Advisors Launches Global Report on $200 Billion+ Smallholder Finance Gap Amid Rising Climate Pressures
The report warns this gap is set to widen as climate change drives rising adaptation needs while lenders retreat from risk, threatening global food security and rural livelihoods.
- Region
- Global
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SACCOs, Social Collateral and Bitcoin Communities: A Filmmaker Documents New (and Old) Ways to Extend Financial Inclusion Past the Limits of Fintech
Luke Willms worked at an African NGO, where he was tasked with creating short videos to showcase the positive impacts of its microcredit program. But as the video project progressed, his assumptions about the effectiveness of microfinance began to unravel. He would spend the next seven years filming stories from across Africa and other regions, exploring whether microlending still held relevance in a rapidly changing world. The resulting documentary, “Unbankable,” was released last year, with the goal of helping to reframe the global conversation around financial inclusion. He shares key stories from the movie, which show how Africa’s informal, trust-based financial systems offer models of resilience and adaptation that could find new applications in other emerging countries.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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How India’s Non-Bank Financial Companies are Closing the MSME Credit Gap — And What Other Emerging Markets Can Learn from Their Success
Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) make up around 90% of businesses and employ over half of the workforce globally, while generating up to 40% of GDP and creating 70% of formal jobs in emerging markets. Yet according to Sameer Nanda at Ugro Capital Limited, these businesses face an ongoing credit gap that, in India alone, amounts to an estimated ₹80 trillion. He explains how non-bank financial companies are addressing this gap by offering dynamic and flexible lending services designed for MSMEs — and shares useful lessons from their approach that can be applied in other emerging economies with similar credit challenges.
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BII Commits $20 Million to Acumen’s Hardest-to-Reach Initiative
The platform aims to expand access to affordable, reliable energy in underserved African markets.
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Visa and PhilGuarantee Ink Deal to Boost Credit Access for MSMEs in the Philippines
The agreement will have Visa and PhilGuarantee explore credit guarantee schemes tailored for MSMEs, widen lending access through partner financial institutions, etc.
- Region
- South Asia
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Analysis: The limits of AI in Social Change
More actors—from grantmaking to service delivery—are exploring the use of AI. However, the excitement around scale and efficiency often overshadows a critical question: What does it mean to bring machine-generated abstraction into systems built on trust, context, and relationship?
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Global
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IDB Group Targets $500 Billion Latin American Loan Pool for Global Investment
The initiative is part of a broader push to close the $1.3 trillion annual climate financing gap in developing countries outside China.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Latin America
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Beyond Shock, Money or Mandate: Why African Banks Aren’t Taking Bold Climate Action — And What it Will Take to Move Forward
Africa is one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world. Yet though climate finance has emerged as a growing solution, African banks have yet to truly ramp up their climate lending. As Carla Legros and Anthony Mbithi argue, one reason for this lack of urgency is that the financial case for this lending has rarely been framed in ways that resonate with how banks operate — namely, as a clear money-making opportunity in the near to medium term. They share a framework for understanding financial institutions' level of engagement in climate finance, providing funders and policymakers with a tool they can use to match their interventions to banks’ institutional reality.
- Categories
- Environment, Finance, Investing
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