Maya Declaration: The AFI member commitment to financial inclusion
Members of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, all developing country and emerging market policymakers and financial regulators, reaffirmed the urgency and importance of financial inclusion and announced a framework for their individual domestic and collective network commitment for bringing more of the world’s poor into the formal financial sector known as the Maya Declaration. The Maya Declaration emerged after a lengthy consultation process and three days of deliberations at the 2011 Global Policy Forum in Rivera Maya, Mexico.
In the Declaration, members recognize the key role that financial inclusion policy plays in bringing stability and integrity, its role in fighting poverty, and its essential contribution toward inclusive economic growth in developing and emerging countries.
The Declaration reaffirms the importance of peer-to-peer knowledge exchange and learning among financial regulators and policymakers to help develop and implement innovative and relevant policy solutions.
The Declaration commits the AFI network of developing country financial authorities to four concrete actions to increase access to financial services:
- Create an enabling environment to harness new technology that increases access and lowers costs of financial services
- Implement a proportional framework that advances synergies in financial inclusion, integrity, and stability
- Integrate consumer protection and empowerment as a key pillar of financial inclusion
- Utilize data for informed policymaking and tracking results
Following the adoption of the Declaration at the 2011 GPF, 17 AFI members responded with concrete commitments outlining their specific goals and targets. AFI has invited all of its 80+ members in emerging and developing countries to respond to the Declaration and submit their concrete and short-to-medium term commitments to increasing financial inclusion.
AFI provides support to its members in achieving their commitments through access to knowledge from their peers and partners and resources such as grants, and will help monitor their progress over time. A progress review will be showcased at the members’ annual meeting – next scheduled for 2012 in South Africa.
View the video declaration statements from the first 16 institutions to respond to the Maya Declaration:
