This week, the historic Armenian town of Dilijan will welcome over 100 AFI members from across the globe for working group meetings on digital financial services (DFS) and consumer empowerment and market conduct (CEMC). Co-hosted by the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), the meetings will take place at the Dilijan Training and Research Centre, a state-of-the-art facility inaugurated in 2013. While CBA has been a long standing and active member of the AFI network, this will be the first time it has officially hosted an AFI event inside Armenia.

The planned agenda for the week takes advantage of the presence of so many AFI members in a single location by incorporating both joint and individual working group sessions.

The meetings will begin on 22 March with joint sessions to examine and debate current trends in financial inclusion, including the impact of the Maya commitments and declaration, opportunities for the promotion of financial inclusion within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, new behavioural research, the upcoming launch of AFI’s financial inclusion data portal as well as areas of common interests and possible collaborative activities between the two working groups. The CEMC and DFS working groups will then break into separate focused policy sessions for the remainder of the week and wrap up their work on 25 March.

These meetings are a reflection of growing influence of financial inclusion policy in Eastern Europe and Central Asia which, thanks to active members such as CBA, is quickly becoming one of the leading regions within the AFI network.