Building Resilience from the Ground Up: Lessons from One of the World's Most Challenging Markets
April 2026
Author: Shiemaa Ahmed is a member of the CAFIID Thought Leadership Committee and an Impact Consultant.
How two decades of deliberate financial inclusion and digitisation enabled FINCA DRC to maintain client access through active conflict in eastern DRC - and what it means for impact investors in fragile and conflict affected markets.
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
FINCA is a global organization focused on mobilizing and delivering capital to microentrepreneurs and early-stage, high-impact enterprises delivering social impact. Founded in 1984, FINCA has a presence in more than 45 countries through its subsidiary network of microfinance institutions and community-based banks and its investee companies. Its mission is to eradicate poverty through sustainable, customer-centered solutions. FINCA DRC is one of FINCA’s flagship subsidiaries, operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 2003. Over the last two decades, it has grown from 5,000 clients to more than 360,000, becoming the country's largest and most digitally advanced microfinance institution. FINCA DRC is a regulated, deposit-taking institution offering a full suite of financial products — from short-term digital loans to SME financing — to low-income entrepreneurs and communities that the formal banking sector does not reach.
FINCA Canada — the Canadian affiliate of FINCA and a CAFIID member — delivered a CAD $15 million financial inclusion project in the DRC in partnership with the Government of Canada between 2017 and 2023. This project supported FINCA DRC to extend financial services to underserved communities and cemented a long-term institutional partnership that continues to shape the organisation's work today.
THE CHALLENGE OF OPERATING IN THE DRC
The DRC presents one of the most challenging operating environments for financial institutions anywhere in the world. Less than 10% of residents hold a formal bank account, more than 60% live below the poverty line, and fewer than 35 km of paved road exists per million inhabitants. This makes conventional banking structurally out of reach for most of the country's 100 million people.
This is further complicated by decades of armed conflict in the country's east, which escalated sharply in January 2025 when M23 forces captured Goma, the regional hub of North Kivu province, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and severing key supply routes. For impact investors, this conflict has reinforced an already elevated risk perception around the DRC.
The conflict resulted in the overnight closure of FINCA DRC’s eastern branches and the institution faced an immediate crisis of continuity, as well as a real risk that tens of thousands of clients would lose access to their funds entirely.
THE APPROACH: A DECADE OF DIGITAL-FIRST INVESTMENT
FINCA DRC's resilience has been built through four pillars:
Digital Infrastructure: Including the flagship biometrics programme which enabled client onboarding without government-issued ID. FINCA was the first microfinance institution in DRC’s market to do so. Additionally, FINCA’s two mobile channels: the CLICK app (available on smartphone and basic feature phone) and the USSD *455# service, which functions on any handset without internet access. By end-2024, the USSD channel had 458,000 registered users — up 26% year-on-year — with 1.9 million sessions. Mobile credit disbursements exceeded USD 100 million. Collectively, digital channels accounted for 84% of all transactions in 2024, with a total value exceeding USD 1.2 billion.
The FINCA eXpress agent banking network, launched in 2011, expanded to 1,744 active agents across all 11 provinces by 2024; processing more than 60% of all client transactions and representing the largest agent operation in the FINCA global network.
Financial Literacy: In partnership with FINCA Canada and the Government of Canada, FINCA DRC delivered financial education across eight provinces, reaching communities through universities, churches, and community centres. FINCA DRC was the only microfinance institution in the DRC to offer financial literacy training to non-clients at scale. Online financial education reached over 7 million people via Facebook in 2024.
Women's Financial Inclusion: The flagship women's credit product, Juste Pour Elle (Just for Her), was launched in March 2021 with support from FINCA Canada. It offers preferential interest rates — 2% below the standard rate — and a grace period before repayments, directly addressing the structural barriers women face in accessing credit, including limited collateral and lack of registered property. By the end of the Financial Inclusion project in 2023, the product had disbursed USD $34.5 million to 2,440 women entrepreneurs.
RESILIENCE IN PRACTICE: JANUARY 2025
When M23 forces closed Goma airport and severed eastern supply routes on 27 January 2025, FINCA DRC's physical branches shut down, and cash logistics became impossible. What followed was a real-world stress test for a decade of digital infrastructure investment:
Clients continued accessing accounts and conducting transactions through the agent network and mobile channels.
POS terminals at agent locations became the primary banking access points for displaced and affected clients.
FINCA DRC’s call centre — operational for ten years — absorbed client queries by phone and email, maintaining service continuity without physical presence.
Field staff visited clients in affected areas to assess needs and support digital account navigation, combining human contact with digital infrastructure.
Loan restructuring for eastern clients was conducted entirely digitally, with no requirement for branch visits.
FINCA DRC continued paying full salaries to eastern-region staff who could not physically work, while growing its portfolio elsewhere to offset eastern losses. That relationship-first approach, sustained through digital channels, is what distinguishes mission-driven institutions from purely commercial operators.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPACT INVESTORS IN CONFLICT-AFFECTED MARKETS
Recognize that patient capital is a structural requirement. The resilience FINCA DRC demonstrated was the product of sustained investment in digital infrastructure, agent networks, and financial literacy over more than a decade. Returns in fragile and conflict-affected markets are non-linear and so is resilience. Investors prepared to hold through disruption, and to absorb the cost of doing so, are better positioned to capture recovery upside and deliver durable impact at scale.
Prioritise investees that are active ecosystem builders, not just market participants. In fragile markets, an institution's ability to sustain impact depends as much on the enabling environment as on its own operations. FINCA DRC's active engagement to advance sector-wide digitisation reforms beyond its own commercial interest reflects an understanding that institutional resilience and ecosystem resilience are inseparable. In conflict settings, this matters acutely: when crisis hits, the institutions that hold the line are those that invested in the conditions that allowed the ecosystem to function for all. For impact investors, an investee's willingness to advocate for the enabling environment — through policy engagement, knowledge sharing, and sector collaboration — is a meaningful signal of long-term viability, and a quality worth weighting in due diligence.
Apply a gender lens to investments in fragile contexts. In conflict-affected markets, the case for gender-intentional investing is a strong economic necessity. When conflict results in the displacement or conscription of men, women become the primary — and often sole — managers of household finances, family businesses, and community economic life. They absorb the shock first, and they are responsible for rebuilding. Yet they simultaneously face the steepest structural barriers. For impact investors in fragile contexts, gender lens investing should be treated as a structural lens for identifying institutions that have genuinely designed for the communities they serve, and that are therefore more likely to hold the line if conditions deteriorate.
Sources: FINCA DRC Rapport Annuel 2024; FINCA DRC UN Global Compact Annual Report 2024; FINCA Canada published documentation (2017–2023); CAFIID member session notes (2025); FINCA Canada / Globe and Mail feature (December 2023). *Financial figures drawn from FINCA DRC certified financial statements. Data attributed to CAFIID member sessions is self-reported.
For more on CAFIID and FINCA DRC, visit https://cafiid.ca , https://finca.cd/ , and https://finca.org/en-ca