Making Microfinance Accessible to Persons with Disabilities

This paper analyzes and presents the findings of an extensive research study that was conducted to uncover barriers hindering financial inclusion for persons with disabilities (PWD) in India. The key stakeholders involved in the exercise were staff and senior management of MFIs, and disabled and non-disabled MFI clients. The research attempted to study and bring to light the thoughts, concerns, and reservations of these stakeholders on the question of onboarding PWD as microfinance clients. Key findings include:

• Study finds a need for greater disability awareness as there are a number of gray areas concerning classification and recognition of disability;
• MFI staff members lack awareness about the non-discrimination policies of their organizations. To address this issue, processes and feedback loops need to be setup, which will document and report PWD client data to senior management;
• MFI staff and leadership displayed willingness and confidence to include PWD as potential clients, as did members of self-help groups;
• MFIs' insufficient capacity to scale will limit their ability to reach out to PWD. This potentially exposes the MFIs to operational and credit risk, to counter which, meticulous capacity building needs to be employed.