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For decades, India has led the drive for financial inclusion of poor rural women to facilitate attainment of development objectives like poverty alleviation and women's empowerment. More recently, it has promoted digital financial inclusion to further its fight against poverty and gender inequality and support the attainment of UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this paper we take stock of how India's digital financial revolution has affected financial transactions and services with a focus on gender inclusivity for the attainment of the SDGs. We propose a framework to understand the gender inclusivity of digital financial inclusion initiatives that connects the macro developments in the sector with the micro-level experiences of improving women's access and use of these services. We draw on India's nationwide developments and present a case study of an initiative that specifically promotes gender inclusive finance. Our findings suggest that India has made great advances in promoting digital financial inclusion but at the same time, the country has struggled to achieve gender parity even within specific finance-focused programmes designed to improve gender inclusivity. We reflect on policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenya has seen unprecedented declines in fertility from the late 1970s, which stalled during the decade from the mid-1990s, only to resume in the early 2000s when Kenya experienced rapid growth in financial inclusion. In this paper, we do not intend to make causal explanations of these phenomena; instead, we explore what may be sensible to adduce from relationships between fertility and financial inclusion. The Kenyan context presents some unique challenges to establish such connections; regional geographic and ethnic differences, spatial and temporal uneven economic growth, diverse legacies of colonialism, all of which may have affected how fertility trends and financial inclusion activities played out. We find that while modernisation variables such as urbanisation, education, wealth and employment are convincingly related to lower fertility levels, there is little plausible evidence of a role for financial inclusion. More plausible explanations may be found in the country's colonial history, ethnic identities and post-independence politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the different methods used within impact evaluation of aid projects and programs of non-governmental organizations, the doubt whether impact evaluation is surely or not evaluation, and strategies that can be used within quantitative and qualitative evaluation to improve its quality.