Savings, Assets, & Financial Inclusion: A Global Symposium

Accumulating assets has many positive economic and social development outcomes for families, communities, and nations. It is primarily through accumulating and investing assets— in education, homes, and enterprise— that families do better over the long term. This is especially true across generations. The purpose of the symposium was to illuminate and inform strategies for inclusion in savings and asset building, with particular attention to people with limited resources around the world, and to continue the conversation well after the symposium's conclusion.


Symposium Overview
There is a growing consensus that all people in the world should be included in saving and asset building. Public policies, financial products, and auxiliary services play important roles in supporting efforts of poor households to save and grow their wealth. Around the world, policies that encourage saving offer poor and low income people an opportunity to change their economic future. Especially, more countries are evaluating the benefits of asset-building policy as a way to promote wealth creation for their citizens. Asset building products and services and emerging asset building policies are critical to our collective goal of increasing the wealth and well being of the four billion people in the world who currently have very little.


Goals of the Symposium

1. Harness the experience and brainpower of leading practitioners, scholars, policy makers, corporate leaders, and funders.
2. Use the lessons and best thinking to inform future directions in public policy and the nature and reach of financial services.
3. Build bridges and connections among the diverse group of leaders and experts, who will participate, so that they can serve as resources for one another in advancing experience, knowledge, policy, and products for more comprehensive and inclusive asset building.