Undocumented communities such as refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants often face significant barriers to accessing digital financial services involuntarily, despite affordable and accessible digital financial services being crucial for their economic integration and empowerment. In order to gain some successful solutions against this exclusion, we needed to build a strong coalition of different partners in different sectors.
What strategies can be leveraged to advance financial inclusion for underrepresented communities like these? Which coalitions should be built, what kind of technologies are needed, and what movements should be connected to?
This panel features diverse experts: Malou Lintmeijer, Savannah Koolen, and Eunice de Asis, all from Stichting Here to Support, a current grantee of Interledger Foundation, working on increasing financial inclusion of refugees and undocumented migrants in the Netherlands together with De Waag and the support of Municipality of Amsterdam; Daphnee Prates Iglesias, policy advisor at UN-IGF, currently leading a working group on digital access, and previously Financial Inclusion Policy Officer at International Rescue Committee;and Sarah Habib, a FinTech Strategies from London that has worked with several FinTech Startups that focuses on supporting refugees. Together, we ask the question: What is the combined role of NGO’s, institutions and communities to create innovative solutions to make social and policy change? They will offer perspectives from their past work and provide a potential blueprint for advancing digital financial rights for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants.