Financial inclusion is about ensuring that individual consumers (particularly low-income consumers) can on a sustainable basis access and use financial services that are appropriate to their needs.

Cenfri has developed a variety of tools for understanding and supporting financial inclusion across different financial sectors.  

Building on the original access frameworks developed by the FinMark Trust, Cenfri's financial inclusion framework considers:

• factors that impact the consumer directly (demand-side)
• as well as those affecting the financial sector providers (supply-side), which also ultimately affect the inclusion/exclusion of the individual.

These take the form of factors excluding access or entry into the formal sector as well as factors discouraging (though not explicitly excluding) use or expansion.

Financial inclusion policy not only aims to ensure that users (and FSPs) are not excluded from the formal sector, but also that they have the incentive to use formal services and actively do so. Factors excluding and discouraging use of formal products are both relevant.

The inclusion framework considers the potential impact of four dimensions of financial inclusion:

• access: factors excluding individuals from a particular product or service;
• use (or take-up): factors discouraging individuals from using a particular product or service;
• entry: factors excluding FSPs from the low-income market; and
• expansion: factors discouraging FSPs from extending services in the low-income market.

Source: Da Silva, R., Chamberlain, D., 2008. Making health insurance work for the poor: Concept paper for research in support of inclusion in healthcare and health insurance markets. Unpublished paper prepared for the FinMark Trust.