The New America Foundation’s Global Assets Project is pleased to announce the launch of the Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative (GSSP). With the generous support of CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor), the CitiFoundation, the FordFoundation, and the NikeFoundation, the GSSP initiative will aim to advance knowledge on savings opportunities for the poorest around the world.

The GSSP Initiative arises from the global movement towards account-linked social protection payments. This movement is gaining steam, with increased interest from the financial inclusion, social policy, behavioral economics, and aid/development fields. While the field of work and study on the topic is only emerging, recent experience suggests that there exists an incredible potential to leverage ongoing strategies toward both financial inclusion and social payments. Such strategies can help to more quickly and effectively provide financial and human capital asset building opportunities for millions of the world’s poorest.

The Global Assets Project will spearhead the effort. Partnering institutions have been instrumental over the last year in nurturing this growing field, highlighting the potential of global savings and social protection linkages and investing in their experimentation and evaluation.

Jamie Zimmerman, Director of the Global Assets Project at New America, expressed optimism that linking savings and cash transfers could inform the way both the social protection and financial inclusion fields approach poverty reduction:  “As the concept gains real traction, so does the opportunity to innovate with a potentially high-leverage anti-poverty, pro-empowerment tool. Our goal with GSSP is to facilitate that innovation.”

Frank F. DeGiovanni, Director of the Ford Foundation’s Financial Assets Unit, stated that “We are pleased to support the New America Foundation’s Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative, as we believe that savings-linked social protection policies and programs have significant potential to help poor families move out of poverty. Accumulating savings in a bank account creates opportunities to establish a credit history, to gain access to other financial services such as money transfers and insurance, and build other assets, such as investing in a small business and saving for education. This will allow families to shift from simply managing poverty to achieving economic security and self-sufficiency.” 

CGAP’s Sarah Rotman emphasized how the untapped potential in the overlap between the social protection and financial inclusion fields warrants more research and attention. “Linking government-to-person (G2P) payments to bank accounts provides a huge opportunity to bring those living in poverty, the unbanked, into the formal financial system,” Rotman said. “It can also make the payments process more efficient and less costly for governments and beneficiaries.”

“At Citi, financial inclusion is at the core of our mission,” said Brandee McHale, Chief Operating Officer of the Citi Foundation. “By supporting the New America Foundation’s Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative, we are reinforcing our commitment to investing in financial inclusion innovations that will help the world’s neediest individuals and families build assets and attain long-term economic security.”

With their support, the GSSP Initiative aims to develop a multi-faceted, multi-stakeholder body of work that ultimately enables the global creation and advancement of sound, effective and efficient savings-linked social protection models.

To that end, the Initiative will, over the next year:

• map out the global landscape of savings-linked social protection policies and programs;
• identify opportunities and challenges to advancing these policies and programs, broadly and within certain contexts such as policies and programs for girls;
• analyze proposed and possible savings product and policy models; and
• share those findings with the emerging and growing field in order to incentivize new research, programs and policies around the world.