Development Channel

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Alfred Hannig, executive director of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. Access to finance for low-income households can improve poor people’s income and overall wellbeing, and in turn spur macroeconomic growth. As International Monetary Fund Chief Christine Lagarde recently said, “inequality is hurting growth.” Realizing this, many central banks in developing countries now aim to use financial inclusion to spur economic growth and address inequality. As a global network of 117 central banks and financial regulators working in ninety-four developing and emerging countries, the Alliance of Financial Inclusion (AFI), where I serve as executive director, is closely tracking this issue. Fortunately, several developments that we’ve observed bode well for increased financial inclusion and global prosperity: 1. Developing countries are becoming financial innovators, particularly in digital financial services. In nine countries in Africa, more people have access to financial services through mobile technology than through bank accounts. And mobile financial technology is set to expand in coming years. 2. Faced with new technologies and regulatory challenges, financial policy makers are learning from each other more than ever. For example, a Chinese delegation of senior central bank officials recently traveled to Peru to learn about consumer protection and the regulation and supervision of nontraditional financial institutions. This is knowledge-sharing especially important as regulators play a critical role in the modern global market by ensuring consumer protection and encouraging competition. 3. Governments are setting ambitious national targets and implementing strategies for financial inclusion as part of their commitment to the Maya Declaration. The Declaration is the first global, measurable set of goals set by developing and emerging countries to unlock the economic and social potential of the 2.5 billion ‘unbanked’ population. More than ninety countries – representing more than 75 percent of the world’s unbanked population – have supported the Declaration. National targets are set through a bottom-up, consultative approach, which energizes stakeholders and strengthens their commitment to achieve the ambitious goals. 4. Public-private dialogues are strengthening policy making. As new products emerge, collaboration among financial service providers, mobile network operators, payment platforms, retail stores, and policy makers is critical to understanding opportunities and risks. Such partnerships help build robust financial systems that increase inclusion and guard against illicit activities. The latest G20 meeting in Sydney, Australia and the African Mobile Phone Financial Services Initiative meeting in Nairobi, Kenya were important steps forward on this front. 5. Global Standard Setting Bodies (SSBs) are recognizing developing country realities. For example, the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision and the Financial Action Task Force have a membership primarily comprised of advanced economies, but are now working with developing and emerging country policymakers. Historically, financial risks were believed to originate from developing and emerging countries with less rigid regulations. As a result, rules and standards prescribed by advanced economies tended to overlook developing country perspectives. But now, as innovative financial inclusion efforts develop and more financial service providers and products become available, SSBs have started to engage with financial inclusion regulators and advocates. In short, central banks have found a new common ground for international cooperation: financial inclusion. In the struggle to get the global economy back on track, fighting inequality is emerging as one of the best ways to spark economic growth.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article from Alicia Phillips Mandaville, managing director of Development Policy at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, is part of an ongoing Development Channel series on global justice and development. Quality of governance matters for development, human rights, and economic growth. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), where I work, puts this principle into practice, and relies on public data to assess  anti-corruption efforts, democratic rights, administrative capacity, and rule of law when making decisions about which countries to aid abroad. Using independently published data makes U.S. foreign assistance more transparent. But finding reliable governance indicators that are both actionable and standardized across countries is a difficult task. For decades, there has been an information gap between the civil society actors who have dedicated their professional lives to quantitatively measuring governance change over time – and the governments, development organizations, and private sector actors who want to use this data to inform their investments. A meeting at the Open Gov Hub last month was an important first step toward closing this gap. Nearly forty government, NGO, media, and private sector colleagues -- people from every region in the world who either create, use, or fund data on quality of governance – met to address the need for coordination.  Importantly, the meeting was driven by members of the governance data community, rather than by a multi-lateral institution. At the meeting, it became clear that all participants were hungry for a forum in which data producers and users could collaborate to make global governance data both more useable, and more used. Acknowledging that better coordination would serve all parties involved, meeting attendees are now working to establish a “Governance Data Alliance.” This alliance represents an important opportunity to enhance everyone’s understanding of governance in the world by addressing gaps in where and how it is measured. For the past decade, MCC has used third-party policy indicators to inform the selection of countries for grant assistance, and has specifically relied on the Worldwide Governance Indicators’ (WGI) Control of Corruption indicator. This indicator aggregates information from up to twenty-one independent sources. The final score is a weighted combination of data on everything from citizen perception of corruption, to expert assessments, to surveys of businesses.  Critically for MCC, WGI covers all low income and lower-middle income countries, and is updated annually. As a result, it is the best available measure we can use. However, as an aggregate, the WGI indicator does not necessarily highlight what MCC most wants to know about corruption, including information about specific government efforts to combat it, or individual’s and organization’s direct experience with it. Now, with the Governance Data Alliance, MCC can communicate this desire for new tools and specific indicators to the broader governance data community, and together we can develop methods of using and capturing that data. Corruption is by definition hidden from the public view, and will likely remain an elusive quality to measure.  But now, with this knowledge gap out in the open, we can begin to have more practical conversations with experts from around the world about plausible ways to measure corruption. Whether you value governance for its impact on individual rights, economic growth, or fundamental stability, last month’s quiet two-day gathering should be celebrated as an important step toward elevating governance on the global development agenda through measurement.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is by Sigrid von Wendel, who edits the Development Channel and Democracy in Development blogs. For centuries, sexual assault in armed conflict was viewed as an unfortunate inevitability. The international community acknowledged the endemic problem in 2008. In a United Nations Security Council resolution, world leaders voted unanimously to identify rape as a war crime and threat to international security. Since then, the UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict coalition has brought together thirteen UN entities to end sexual violence in conflict. Some infamous perpetrators have since been brought to justice, including Lieutenant Colonel Mayele, charged with commanding the rape of over three hundred men, women, and children in the eastern Congo. But more must be done. A growing body of research finds that sexual violence is not as inextricably linked to conflict as was once believed. For example, Professor Elisabeth Wood’s work finds that sexual violence varies over time, place, armed group, and conflict—and some armed groups refrain from committing sexual assault almost entirely. Strong command and communications frameworks, strategic considerations, and religious and ethnic differences can all be reasons for armed groups to refrain from perpetrating sexual violence. In some cases, for example, commanders insist their troops not engage in sexual violence against the local population for fear of losing public support and intelligence tips. Wood and others find “the wide variation in wartime rape across armed groups demonstrates that these groups can, and often do, prohibit sexual violence. This in turn creates an opportunity to push for greater accountability.” Sexual violence also varies based on motivation and identity of the armed groups. It can be committed by state or non-state combatants through centrally organized or unorganized campaigns. These differences are crucial to prevention efforts: as Wood notes, “if we want to decrease the instances of sexual violence, we should acknowledge that rape happens for different reasons in different contexts and figure out what motivations can move the relevant actors towards eliminating it.” At times, sexual violence is an explicit war tactic used to intimidate, control, and harass local populations. In these cases, orders to commit acts of sexual violence come down through the command structure and are conducted with a strategic objective in mind. Even when sexual assault is not used as a military tool, weak command structures and lax enforcement of policies can allow sexual violence to become a decentralized practice, conducted by perpetrators acting without or against orders. In order to protect citizens trapped in war’s path, governments and international organizations should first and foremost ensure that their agents in the field are not committing acts of sexual violence themselves. The UN has helped reduce sexual violence, but also faces its own internal challenge of its peacekeepers and other humanitarian workers conducting rape in conflict zones, including in the Congo,Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, and Sudan. For the UN to truly lead the charge in ending sexual violence, it must enforce a zero-tolerance policy, strong reporting and command structures, and thorough training programs regarding sexual violence. The United States military also has its share of sexual violence -- both within ranks and against civilian populations -- but recent exposés have pushed military leaders to strengthen prevention, training, and reporting programs. As a part of this pursuit, Washington should make sexual violence prevention training a cornerstone of not only of its own operations, but also of those it conducts in other countries. Making sexual assault prevention a part of military partnerships worldwide, and stressing the strategic gains of defending local populations, has both foreign policy and human rights benefits. By combating and preventing sexual violence, governments can make way for economic recovery and prosperity, defend human rights, ensure the safety and support of local populations, and, in turn, stabilize volatile regions. Governments and international organizations should focus more research and development funding toward this topic. Current research sheds light on variation in sexual violence, but there is not yet enough in-depth study on why it occurs in some situations and not others, how sexual assault strategies and practices are formed and changed, and how that information can be translated into effective prevention policies. As gruesome reports of widespread sexual violence in the ongoing Syrian conflict prove, there is no time to waste in understanding sexual violence in armed conflict and developing strategies to end it. Sexual violence needs to be viewed by governments, militaries, and international organizations as a preventable problem, with strategic importance to global stability and development.