Support for an Enabling Regulatory Environment (SERE)
Issue Areas
Over 6 years, since 2016, RPA has worked as a fiscal sponsor of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) managing financial inclusion projects in Nigeria. RPA has managed two major grants specifically focused on driving social investment programs and an enabling regulatory environment towards financial inclusion.
Grant I: Direct Benefit Transfer Pilot and Other Initiatives
In 2016, RPA received a 3 year grant from BMGF to fund several initiatives geared towards supporting Nigeria’s social intervention programs. The primary objectives and scope of this grant include:
- Using technology to support the digitization of government benefits managed by Nigeria’s National Social Investment Office (NSIO) including microloan disbursal, wages for school cooks and direct cash transfer to rural poor.
- Provide funding support to the Government Enterprise Empowerment Program (GEEP), the largest government-financed microloan program in the world.
Support provided through this grant, which was executed in 3 years, led to the following outcomes:
Grant II: Supporting an Enabling Regulatory Environment
In 2020, RPA received a second grant from BMGF to provide broad range of technical support to regulators that will facilitate an enabling regulatory environment to further strengthen the building blocks for Digital Financial Services in Nigeria. This grant, which is live, is premised on a key lesson learnt from Nigeria Grant I “that regulators subsist between government transitions and remain the key drivers and implementing organs for enabling policies.” The scope of this grant includes providing support to:
