National Financial Inclusion Strategy launched
View(s):Sri Lanka’s first National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), launched on Thursday, aims to make financial services more accessible, efficient, and affordable for all households and businesses in the country, official sources said.
The NFIS is a joint effort led by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka—with technical and financial assistance from IFC, a member of the World Bank Group—under the IFC-DFAT Women in Work programme. The development of this strategy was a multi-stakeholder effort supported by the Government.
The new strategy highlights Sri Lanka’s gains in boosting access to financial services, and particularly, on areas of improvement to ensure usage and full financial inclusion in the country.
“The National Financial Inclusion Strategy symbolizes country’s commitment towards a better and inclusive Sri Lanka that will benefit all individuals and enterprises. This strategy will complement the Government’s efforts to minimize the provincial income disparities, urban-rural inequalities, and to promote inclusive growth,” Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa disclosed.
“More importantly, this strategy prioritizes future generations, having identified financial literacy and was developed through a national level survey conducted by the Central Bank in 2018, he said at the launch ceremony. The survey, which took a gender-sensitive approach, helped identify the current status of financial inclusion, where for example, women tend to use informal rather than formal sources of financing.
It highlighted that low financial awareness, particularly for digital financial services, is a common issue among both men and women.
Based on these findings, the strategy is structured around four core pillars—increase access to digital finance and payments, boost access to finance for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), protect financial consumers, and improve financial literacy among consumers, including women.