 The cycle of the book is financial inclusion for poverty alleviation, issues in case studies for sustainable development, and the book was co-edited by my colleague Dr Zanibah Basha Oravushi from the Swiss Helper Thass Intercooperation. But first, let me take a moment to explain what we mean by financial inclusion. What makes this book different from the current discourse of financial inclusion is the fact that at the moment financial inclusion is understood as either simply having a bank account or having access to microcredit. In this book, our view or approach towards financial inclusion is much more wider and more holistic. What we mean by financial inclusion in the book is that financial services and products need to be affordable, usable, and at the same time suitable. So what this means is that a number of people, particularly low-income groups and marginalised communities, I'm talking about almost 3 billion people of the world population do not necessarily have access to suitable and affordable financial products and services. And I think it's very timely now that we talk extensively or hold debates and provide platforms for people to discuss about the importance of financial inclusion now. Financial inclusion has received increasing attention by development practitioners and policy makers as of late. A manifestation of that is the fact that financial inclusion is identified as one of the key targets in the system of development goals as a vehicle to enable people to propel themselves out of the poverty trap. So essentially the way we understand financial inclusion has to be just beyond microfinance and opening bank accounts. We need to A, understand the heterogeneity of those users, in particular the low-income groups and marginalised sections of the society do not necessarily have access to a number of services such as land, education, etc. We need to understand the key constraints that they face today and our financial products and services need to be able to cater to the needs of these groups. Essentially what happens most of the time is financial services and products are designed in the same fashion that they are designed in the high streets of London or Paris or New York but it shouldn't be that way. We need to understand the reality on the ground, particularly that these poor people face and tailor our financial products and services in such a manner. The second element that we need to look at or need to understand is the fact that even though people are financially excluded it does not necessarily mean they are financially inactive. People are able to save, make transactions or even spend money or manage their expenditure etc. So financial exclusion doesn't necessarily mean financial inactivity. They are in fact financially very very active groups of the society. However the lack of access to such kind of in a inclusive financial services and products has forced them to depend on very expensive or extortionist financial service providers and as a result they have not been able to attain their full potential in terms of not necessarily with the standing shocks be it economic or climatic but also to be able to prosper and permanently be able to propel themselves out of poverty. Most importantly one thing we need to understand is financial inclusion does not happen in a vacuum. We need to have the right institutions in place that enable financial inclusion to happen. For instance we're talking about about three billion of the world population who do not necessarily have access to financial products and services. This is a significant opportunity for the private sector to be able to provide suitable and affordable and usable financial products and services but for that to happen I think the role of governments or institutions to provide incentives for the private sector to extend their services to these groups is very important. Also equally important is when we talk about financial inclusion we need to talk beyond just providing the service but also improving the financial literacy of the section of the society as well in terms of you know how do you manage risk for instance or how do you manage expenditure or how do you manage you know debt servicing etc etc. So I think we need to look at the entire financial ecosystem just beyond the demand in supply. We look at the entire financial ecosystem which looks at institutions, local power structures but at the same time the capacities as well such as in financial literacy and risk management all these elements need to be looked at as one entity as opposed to simply focusing on the demand and supply of financial services and products.