Following decades of armed conflict, providing rural Colombians with financial services is essential to building an inclusive economy and promoting stability.
Technical Brief: Helping Rural Financial Institutions Expand Rural Service Delivery .
Technical Brief | August 30, 2020
Through five working principles, USAID’s Rural Finance Initiative served as central change agents by providing highly customized advisory services, mixing expertise from the Colombian financial sector and the development community. This reached more than 750,000 rural clients and mobilize $999 million in financial services.
Access to financial services enables rural households to build financial security, start enterprises, and insure against risks. This access, in turn, generates secondary benefits, improving resilience, health, nutrition, and broad-based economic growth. In 2015, USAID launched the Rural Finance Initiative (RFI), implemented by Chemonics International, to provide technical assistance to financial institutions in Colombia so that they could identify profitable opportunities to expand client-responsive services into rural
markets.