Expanding Financial Inclusion to Include Grassroots Organizations.
Accountable Partners is pioneering Grassroots FinTech—the financial infrastructure that makes community organizations visible, trusted, and fundable.
The Gap
The Blind Spot in Financial Inclusion
For decades, financial inclusion has focused on individuals and small businesses.
But the organizations delivering on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, working on the frontlines of health, education, justice, and women’s empowerment still operate outside the digital systems donors rely on.
They are trusted by their communities,
but not yet trusted by the systems that fund them.
Not because they lack capacity—
but because the infrastructure they need was never built for them.
This is organizational financial exclusion.
The Category
Grassroots FinTech: Infrastructure, Not Capacity-Building
Grassroots FinTech extends financial inclusion to community-based organizations by giving them simple, mobile-first ways to show where money goes and how it’s used.
It reframes accountability as:
- Continuous, not occasional
- Built into infrastructure, not added on through endless training
- Accessible on a phone, not dependent on accountants and spreadsheets
One example of this work is Lychee, the smartphone-based transparency tool for grassroots organizations.
But Grassroots FinTech is bigger than any single product—it is the next chapter of financial inclusion.
About Suzanne & Accountable Partners
I’ve spent more than 30 years working alongside local organizations in Niger, Bangladesh, Mozambique, and Afghanistan.
Everywhere, I saw the same pattern: organizations delivering vital work, labeled “not fundable” or “not scalable” because the systems donors required were not yet built.
We are changing that.
Through Accountable Partners, I’m expanding the field of Financial Inclusion to include Community Organizations, so they can finally be seen, trusted, and funded at scale.
Invitation
How much more could grassroots organizations do if they had supportive infrastructure?
Localization, trust, and scale all depend on solving organizational financial exclusion.
If you’re a donor, practitioner, or financial inclusion leader who feels this tension, I’d love to be in conversation.
Launching December 2025
Join us in pioneering financial inclusion for organizations.