Digital and Financial Literacy for Youth is likely to become an increasingly important aspect of education and with the development of the ”gig” economy individuals will become more responsible for their own financial planning. To expand the benefits of digital infrastructure to the 1.3 billion Indians, financial innovation must keep the 65% rural population at the center of the design. There is a need to find solutions that will bridge the discernible digital divide and barriers to financial literacy between various income groups in the country. Do you have a solution that will enable vulnerable groups, including the elderly, the less educated, owners of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) , startup firms, and women to leverage the advantages of digital technology and be a part of the mainstream economy.
Resources :Innovations for an inclusive financial system | Mint https://www.oecd.org/finance/G20-OECD-INFE-Policy-Guidance-Digitalisation-Financial- Literacy-2018.pdf
Rethinking financial inclusion with digital assets
Women’s gender equality and economic empowerment includes their ability to participate equally in existing markets; their access to and control over productive resources, access to decent work, and increased voice, agency and meaningful participation in economic decision-making at all levels from the household to international institutions. Have you developed solutions that add value for women and girls affected by humanitarian and development challenges and give them an equitable opportunity. Do you have a solution that can be a driver of change for the problems faced by women and girls?
Biodiversity and ecosystem services, or nature for short, underpin many aspects of economic activity and are deteriorating at an unprecedented level, with potentially far-reaching implications for economies worldwide. Sustained ecosystem damage can trigger regime shifts and generate systemic impacts on human well-being and economies. Governments and regulators, supported by financial institutions and multilateral development banks (MDBs), hold the key to mobilizing private finance at the scale needed to transform the way we build, produce, and consume in order to protect nature while fostering sustainable poverty reduction. Do you have an innovative solution that can bridge the intention-action gap between ‘financing green,’ – the financing of projects that contribute or intend to contribute— to the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of biodiversity or ‘greening finance,’ that is, directing financial flows away from projects with a negative impact on biodiversity and ecosystems to projects that mitigate negative impact, or pursue positive environmental impact as a co-benefit.
FinTech is one of the fastest-growing technology segments in India, accounting for the highest FinTech adoption rate (87%) and is the biggest destination for investments worldwide .The emergence of FinTech, as a pivotal force, changing the paradigms of the financial sector, offers an opportunity to allocate more resources towards biodiversity conservation. Do you have solutions that can build better systems for Promoting Green Behavior & Investments through FinTech to enhance the use of e-wallets, increase the impact of social media on conservation or create bio diversity trading opportunity.
Over the past decades, humanity has breached two major milestones: the world is consuming 100 billion tonnes of materials and it is 1-degree warmer. Our world is only 8.6% circular [Circularity Gap report]. The circular economy is an alternative to the linear ‘take-make-waste’. It seeks to design out waste, regenerate natural ecosystems and keep materials and products in use for as long as possible. To this end, resources are not consumed and discarded, destroying their value. Rather, their value is retained by reusing, repairing, remanufacturing, upcycling and recycling. As per OECD, only 9% of plastic waste is successfully recycled. We need to now increasingly move from recycling towards upcycling i.e. transforming by-products and waste materials, into new usable materials. In order to make this happen we need innovations not only around alternative solutions but also alternative circular business models.
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At the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP26), Hon’ble Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi announced Mission LiFE, to bring individual behaviors at the forefront of the global climate action narrative.
LiFE envisions replacing the prevalent ‘use-and-dispose’ economy—governed by mindless and destructive consumption—with a circular economy, which would be defined by mindful and deliberate utilization. The Mission intends to nudge individuals to undertake simple acts in their daily lives that can contribute significantly to climate change when embraced across the world.
LiFE plans to leverage the strength of social networks to influence social norms surrounding climate. The Mission plans to create and nurture a global network of individuals, namely ‘Pro-Planet People’ (P3), who will have a shared commitment to adopt and promote environmentally friendly lifestyles. Through the P3 community, the Mission seeks to create an ecosystem that will reinforce and enable environmentally friendly behaviors to be self-sustainable.
