RFP Conduct Qualitative Demand-side Survey in Cambodia

United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), the UN’s flagship catalytic blended financing platform, supports market development by enabling access to finance in high-risk environments through financial instruments, mechanisms, and advisory services. With a unique mandate, UNCDF blends and deploys grants, loans, and guarantees alongside related advisory support.

The National Bank of Cambodia is planning to conduct a third national representative financial inclusion survey to support its national financial inclusion strategy (NFIS) refresh. NFIS surveys including FinScope (2015), the Mobile Tracker (2021) or Findex (2011,2014,2017,2021) are a cornerstone of financial inclusion diagnostics and strategy, however survey data alone is often insufficient to capture the why behind observed patterns in financial access and usage — particularly for underserved or last-mile segments such as low income populations, small scale women farmers or women micro-merchants.

UNCDF has implemented various qualitative research in addition to survey data across Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Senegal, and Tanzania, that demonstrated that women face deeply context-specific and gendered barriers rooted in social norms, restricted mobility, limited documentation, and ill-adapted product and policy design. A dedicated qualitative fieldwork component is therefore proposed to complement the broader NFIS survey diagnostic, enabling richer, human-centred insights that inform particularly the gender component and consumer protection pillars of the strategy — dimensions that a standard survey may not fully surface.

Objective:

The objective of this TOR is to implement the qualitative component including qualitative interviews to surface demand-side barriers and enablers to financial access and usage across specific customer segments, with a particular focus on gender dynamics, consumer protection and financial health including financial resilience (ability to cope with shocks). Using the power of mixed methods — combining this qualitative data with quantitative survey results — the component is designed to:

•   Understand the lived financial health experiences of underserved segments

•  Identify structural and behavioural barriers preventing access to and usage of formal financial services to inform consumer protection

•   Generate actionable insights for policy making around key pillars - gender, consumer protection of the NFIS

•  Generate customer profiles, voices and perspectives complementary and in addition to the aggregate survey data