ReFinD Executive Director Prof. Peter Quartey leads the December 3 inception workshop, bringing together new grantees to foster collaboration for advancing financial inclusion in LMICs
ReFinD has awarded grants to nine innovative projects in its third funding round, expanding the initiative’s total portfolio to 29 funded studies. The selected projects span Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. This diverse geographical representation reflects successful outreach efforts to attract high-impact research proposals from traditionally underrepresented regions.
Prof. Peter Quartey, ReFinD's Executive Director, led an inception workshop on December 3 to formally welcome the new grantees. The session served multiple purposes, including introducing grantees to ReFinD's mission and objectives, clarifying expected deliverables and timelines, outlining the initiative's communication strategy, and facilitating collaboration between grantees and the ReFinD team.
The funded projects address key challenges in financial inclusion, ranging from enhancing agent banking connectivity in Indonesia to developing effective agent selection methods in Niger's emerging mobile money market. These projects were selected through a competitive process that drew applications from 14 countries.
Building on ReFinD's commitment to expanding financial access, the new projects promise to generate actionable insights for strengthening agent networks and advancing financial inclusion across developing economies. The ReFinD team looks forward to supporting this new cohort of grantees as they contribute to the vital mission of developing evidence-based solutions to drive financial inclusion in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). ReFinD extends its sincere appreciation to all researchers who submitted proposals under this funding round.
Below is the list of projects funded under the third ReFinD funding round:
Competition for transparency: A randomized experiment in Ghana
Institution: University of California Berkeley
Country- Ghana
Category – Greenfield
Enhancing connectivity for agent banking: A pilot study on satellite internet for expanding the network of digital finance retail agents in rural Indonesia.
Institution: Loughborough University, UK
Country: Indonesia
Category: Pilot
Contract transparency and agent misconduct: Evidence from digital finance retail vendors.
Institution: ISSER
Country: Ghana
Category: Proposal Development
Identify good agents in a nascent mobile money market
Institution: Tufts University
Country: Niger
Category: Proposal Development
Tackling productivity losses in mobile money Services: The role of agent well-being
Institution: Queens University
Country: Ghana
Category: Proposal Development
Addressing dormancy among micro-fintech agents in India: A scalable personalization approach
Institution: University of California Berkeley
Country: India
Category: Extension
Optimizing subsidy allocation in two-sided markets: Evidence from digital payments
Institution: University of California Berkeley
Country: Ghana
Category: Pilot
Deepen the understanding of banking agent operations and undertake research interventions
Institution: Ecobank
Country: 33 countries
Category: Pilot.