Layering and tailoring financial services for resilience: Insights, opportunities and challenges from BRACED projects in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal and Senegal

This report explores how BRACED projects support the development and delivery of tailored-to-context financial services. It also assesses to what extent these are integrated within existing financial service systems, risk financing structures and wider resilience building projects. More specifically, the report considers two dimensions:

• Whether and how BRACED activities are following a layered approach to financial service provision. This entails a consideration of the variety of risks beneficiaries are exposed to, as well as the various types of financial services and resources people access to manage these risks. Such resources and services include formal, semi-formal or informal financial services along with cash transfers through public safety nets or remittances. A layered approach to financial service provision at project level, consequently, would mean that projects view their financial service interventions within a wider context of available risk financing options and emergency resources people have at their disposal to address a variety of idiosyncratic and covariate risks; and aim to support existing approaches or fill the major gaps through their activities;

• We shed light on how projects are tailoring services such as savings accounts, loans or insurance products to the socio-economic and environmental contexts in which they operate. This entails looking at the ways in which financial services and products are adjusted, for instance to reflect specific risk environments, cater to social or religious needs, or are embedded in economic and sectoral structures.