Financial inclusion and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: a missed opportunity

• Autores: Jahel Queralt Lange, Jonathan Fu, Michele Romano
• Localización: Enterprise development & microfinance, ISSN 1755-1978, Vol. 28, Nº. 3, 2017, págs. 200-211
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Approximately 2 billion adults, just below half of the world’s adult population, are financially excluded. They lack access to formal or semi-formal savings, credit, and insurance services. The vast majority of these adults live a hand-to-mouth existence in the developing world. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development takes a rather unambitious approach to financial inclusion (FI). It recognizes its importance in advancing several sustainable development goals (SDGs), but it does not include it as a stand-alone goal. This paper criticizes this approach and claims that the new agenda has been a missed opportunity to focus efforts on finding ways of meeting the financial needs of the global poor. We analyse three of the main reasons for not including FI as a sustainable goal: namely, the instrumentality argument, the free market argument, and the veil argument.