The impact of self-affirmation intervention on financial inclusion
Principal investigators: Ashraful Haque, North South University
Funding organization: World Bank 
Project timeline: 2018-2019

Background
In Bangladesh, majority of the women live in rural areas where the access to Financial Institutions (FI) is low. In addition, women’s access to FI is very limited compared to men. Under this background, IFC implemented activities under the Women Mobile Financial Services (MFS) Bangladesh project in two phases to provide an extensive set of knowledge on the women MFS market to facilitate their inclusion into the formal financial system through MFS, and catalyze the transition of garment factories from cash based payments to digital MFS salary disbursements for their staff. Even though a significant progress was made in opening mobile money accounts by women, the use of these accounts is not encouraging. 

Research objective and design
The project rendered financial literacy training and opened new MFS account for 280,510 women in phase 1 and 70,357 women in the garment sector in phase 2. 496 beneficiaries who were seldom using their MFS account or not using at all were selected from this universe and were randomly assigned to either a control group (just provided with the financial literacy training and MFS account) or to a self-affirmation intervention. Participants were followed up 6 months later after the intervention. 

Result and policy lessons
Forthcoming