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Zambia, World Bank launch program to boost financial inclusion

Xinhua, November 3, 2015 Adjust font size:

Zambia and the World Bank on Monday launched a program aimed at mobilizing technical capacity and knowledge to help the southern African nation achieve its financial inclusion targets and goals.

The Financial Inclusion Support Framework (FISF) is a 2.75 million U.S. dollars trust fund to be executed by the World Bank in collaboration with the Zambian government and funded by the Dutch government.

Its objective is to help Zambia to develop and implement key reforms in the policy, regulatory and supervisory environment for enhancing financial inclusion for individuals and enterprises.

Sebastian Molineus, the World Bank Group Director of Finance and Markets Global Practice, said during the launch that Zambia is among 25 priority countries where the Bank is focusing its scaled-up support to financial access and inclusion.

The World Bank, he said, firmly believes that financial inclusion is important because it has the potential to eradicate extreme poverty and increase shared prosperity.

The official however said despite the tremendous progress of the last few years, about 38 percent of adults remain unbanked in the world, which translates into 2 billion people excluded financially.

The official however said Zambia has made remarkable progress in financial inclusion with figures showing that the proportion of adults with financial access, both formal and informal, increased from 37.3 percent in 2009 to 59.3 percent in 2015.

However, a significant portion of Zambia's population does not have access to formal financial services and program will help to reach mostly the rural and low income population, he added.

Denny Kalyalya, the Governor of the Bank of Zambia (BoZ), called on banks and other financial service providers to make available more suitable products and services that appeal to the needs of the public as part of the broader financial inclusion agenda.

"An inclusive financial sector has the catalytic effect of helping a nation to diversify the economy and boost other sectors like agriculture, tourism and manufacturing, thereby improving the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)," he said.

"For economic sectors to improve, the much needed investment can only come when banks create sufficient loanable funds to extend credit to other sectors," he added.

Financial inclusion is a priority for the World Bank Group to meet the challenges of achieving universal financial access globally by 2020. Endit