A column by Artem Lyashanov, a fintech entrepreneur, investor, and transactional business expert who follows the financial inclusion sector as a related area to his own work in payments technology.
In short: in 2025, three major sources of donor funding for financial inclusion simultaneously reduced their commitments: USAID, several European governments, and the Gates Foundation. This coincidence is forcing the sector to shift from a donor-driven model to new archetypes of sustainability.
Imagine an industry that was built on a single source of funding for twenty years, only to have that source cut off almost simultaneously from several directions. This is precisely what happened to financial inclusion in 2025, and why 2026 will likely be the year the sector will have to answer the question of what it will become without a donor behind it.
What exactly was cut in 2025
Three events converged almost simultaneously:
- USAID effectively ceased operations in their previous form;
- Germany, France, and the Netherlands significantly reduced their bilateral commitments;
- The Gates Foundation announced the closure of its Inclusive Financial Systems team by 2030.
Each of these events individually would have been significant for the sector. Their convergence marks a structural shift in how financial inclusion will be financed and managed in the coming years.
Twenty Years of a Donor Economy
The financial inclusion sector grew out of the microcredit movement. Over two decades, it has evolved into a complex ecosystem. Fintech companies, impact investors, multilateral and bilateral donors, regulators, and consultants.
For years, donor funding covered what the market itself was not prepared to finance:
- Working with the most difficult-to-reach clients;
- Market research and analysis;
- Protecting consumers from risks that commercial players have no interest in measuring.
According to the Global Findex 2025, approximately 80% of adults worldwide now have an account at a financial institution, with significant progress in gender equality and digital access.
It’s also significant that, for the first time in history, the report opens with a section on mobile phone ownership. Technical infrastructure has become an integral part of the agenda itself, – Artem Lyashanov.
A risk that should be addressed directly
Not everything in this restructuring is unambiguously positive.
Working with the most inaccessible and commercially uninteresting market segments is inherently difficult to monetize. If the primary funding mechanism for the sector shifts toward investment and commercial logic, this work risks being left without sustainable support.
The same applies to consumer protection and market oversight: the results of such work are not always measurable in quarterly reports, and donor programs have spent years creating learning cycles and demonstration models that are difficult to sustain without a long, non-commercial planning horizon.
Funding cuts almost certainly mean the loss of some of the expertise and institutional memory that has accumulated over the years, – notes Artem Lyashanov.
The question is whether the sector will have time to consciously decide what to protect first before a simple lack of funding makes that decision for it.
Why this isn’t unambiguously bad news
Twenty years of the donor model have created not only results, but also dependency. Part of the sector seems accustomed to operating within the logic of the grant cycle rather than a sustainable business model.
Funding cuts are a crude but effective way to determine what the market truly needs from what was built, and what existed only because the donor paid for it. Hybrid models, however, emerge precisely where there is real, not artificially maintained, demand.