Transforming Financial Inclusion to Finance Inclusive Prosperity in Ramallah, Palestine

This research will explore how current processes of financial inclusion (FI) can be transformed to create inclusive prosperity that reflects community priorities. We know little about how communities experience existing top-down state and private sector-led processes of FI, and how such processes connect with community understandings of prosperity - what they really value and consider a 'good life'. The research will examine the relationship between FI and prosperity in Palestine, where FI can be studied in 'real life'. A National Strategy for Financial Inclusion 2018-2025, heavily shaped by global institutions like the World Bank and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), was recently launched and challenges to realising inclusive prosperity are significant because of the Israeli Occupation. This extreme case will be beneficial for assessing the limits of existing theories (of FI) and developing new concepts. A co-produced research process will (1) use ethnographic methods to evaluate the impact of FI on people's lives in Ramallah, where financial institutions and services in Palestine are concentrated; (2) record and use community driven understandings of prosperity to build a prosperity index - a tool that allows academics and governments to better engage citizens' perspectives and create locally salient pathways to prosperity. Insights from ethnographic research and the prosperity index will be combined to generate a new conceptual articulation of financing prosperity. They will also be the basis for policy insights and an institutional secondment that transforms existing FI policies and practices to better meet people's aspirations.

Aims
1. Assess how existing FI policies and practices impact people's lived experiences.
2. Use community visions of prosperity to transform practices of FI so they are better able to achieve such prosperity.

Objectives
(i) analyse how global, regional and state FI policies and practices shape experiences of FI in Ramallah,...