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This website serves as the codebook for the dataset used in the Financial Inclusion Insights Challenge hosted by DrivenData and Kantar.

In this codebook you will find a list of all variables contained in the dataset, grouped by survey section, along with a short description of what the variable indicates and the levels of possible responses. Selecting a survey section in the navigation bar to the left will show all variables in that section and expand the section to provide direct links to each variable.

Notes:

  • NaNs indicate the variable is not available for that country/year.
  • DK means the respondent answered the question with “I don’t know.”

You may visit the competition Discussion Forum for questions or further discussion about the dataset.

About the challenge

Globally, 1.7 billion people are excluded from formal financial services, such as savings, payments, insurance, and credit. In developing economies, only 63 percent of adults have an account. Women are excluded from the financial system more often than men, and banks traditionally have had little incentive to service low-income customers. Providing people living in poverty with better financial tools can help them with the critical need to economize scarce resources. Including more people financially, particularly women, is an important part of the solution to global poverty.

Kantar produces original data and practical knowledge on consumer demand for financial services, and trends in the uptake and use of mobile money and digital payments. Over the past 7 years Kantar’s Financial Inclusion Insights (FII) program, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has implemented annual nationally representative surveys on financial inclusion in eight countries in Africa and Asia. With a combined population of over 2.1 billion, these countries are home to the majority of the world’s financially excluded people.

These surveys provide unparalleled detail on the demand side of financial markets, including ownership of financial accounts and use of products and services provided by formal financial institutions as well as informal institutions such as local savings groups and moneylenders. The surveys encompass brand awareness, economic attitudes and behaviors, demographics, education, employment, income, literacy, mobile technology, and other individual and household characteristics. The data from each survey have been harmonized and merged into the world’s largest, integrated survey dataset on financial inclusion, spanning 442,265 individual interviews and 442 indicators.

We are inviting data scientists and analysts to use this unique dataset to develop insights into the many factors that drive growth in financial inclusion. How these factors are distributed across populations and how and why they change over time are challenging questions that can have a meaningful impact on the success of efforts to expand financial inclusion.