Philanthropy and Financial Inclusion

Philanthropic foundations have played a key role in advancing the agenda of financial inclusion. This agenda has, over recent decades, built a reputation as a transformative strategy and, for many development practitioners, a favoured intervention for international development. This chapter outlines how philanthropic foundations came to play a central role in the proliferation of financial inclusion approaches through their support for two shifts that shaped international development. One of these is the financialisation of development, and the other is an emphasis on poor people, instead of poor countries. Because of these shifts, the poor came to be seen less as beneficiaries of development and more as actors, consumers, and entrepreneurs, responsible for their own economic successes and failures. The advocacy of philanthropic foundations and the influence of philanthrocapitalists in social policy have been, as shown in this chapter, pivotal to the reputation of financial inclusion as a transformative strategy.