1 - Introduction

Summary

OUR GOAL: To help people in the world's poorest regions improve their lives and build sustainable futures by connecting them with digitally-based financial tools and services.

(Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2017)

We seek a world in which people have the financial ability to deal with and adapt to climate change, gender inequality, and data opportunities and risks.

(Centre for Financial Inclusion 2020)

Such ambitions, voiced on a global scale in the Maya Declaration on Financial Inclusion (AFI 2012) and the World Bank's Financial Inclusion Global Initiative, play an increasingly important role in current debates on sustainable development. The goal of Banking the World (Cull et al. 2013) not only identifies a form of development that, bringing together the governmental, financial and NGO sectors, benefits from significant support; it also claims solidarity with the dreams and ambitions of the poor. From being a fringe discourse within human geography in the mid-to late 1990s (see Leyshon & Thrift 1994, 1995, 1996), financial inclusion has become a dominant and relatively unchallenged framing of both the problem of poverty and its potential solutions in the developing and developed worlds.

This book serves as an introduction for readers in the social sciences to the concept of financial inclusion. Despite playing a key role in shaping policy decisions across multiple national domains, as well as understandings of inequality and development globally, analysis and critique of the concept has been for the most part confined to the fields of economics and development studies. Importantly for this book, it has rarely been taken seriously as a concept in relation to class, gender and material poverty in different national settings.

The book follows the development and application of financial inclusion within various policy contexts. It introduces readers to the different roles the concept has played as well as the complex and unexpected ways in which initiatives have reshaped socio-economic practices. It traces and analyses key differences of interpretation, notably that between how the term has been used in developing and developed countries, as well as its relation to the sister terms financial exclusion, financial capability, financial literacy and others.