Financial inclusion is usually measured by access: does a household have a bank account, a savings product, a way to borrow. By that yardstick a community can score well while its residents get little out of the system.
I wanted to know which of those two pictures described Citayam, a commuter area on the edge of Greater Jakarta.
Designed and ran an independent survey of residents, then built a financial inclusion index from the responses and looked at how people were actually using the financial services they had.
The inclusion index came out high. But the benefits people obtained from financial services were still limited, because engagement was mostly driven by a work requirement — accounts held because an employer needed them, rather than chosen for saving, borrowing or protection.
Access and benefit are different outcomes. An index built on access alone can report success in exactly the place where the service is doing the least.
It was the first time I saw a headline metric credit an outcome to the wrong cause — the same problem I now work on with promotional spend.
Data: Independent survey.
Tools: Excel, Pandas, Seaborn.