---
title: "Mobile money as insurance against climate shocks"
description: "Financial inclusion is a large topic in the finance journals, and climate shocks a growing one in economics, but only 14 of 367 recent inclusion and payments papers carry a climate or disaster keyword. When droughts and floods hit, does mobile money bring help fast enough to keep households from selling assets or taking children out of school?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/mobile-money-as-climate-insurance
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/mobile-money-as-climate-insurance.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Financial inclusion is a large topic in the finance journals, and climate shocks a growing one in economics, but only 14 of 367 recent inclusion and payments papers carry a climate or disaster keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["finance", "economics", "development"]
keywords: ["mobile money", "financial inclusion", "climate shocks"]
---

# Mobile money as insurance against climate shocks

Financial inclusion is a large topic in the finance journals, and climate shocks a growing one in economics, but only 14 of 367 recent inclusion and payments papers carry a climate or disaster keyword. When droughts and floods hit, does mobile money bring help fast enough to keep households from selling assets or taking children out of school?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 367 papers carry a financial-inclusion, digital-payment or mobile-money keyword (229 in finance journals, 88 in economics), and only 14 of them carry a climate, weather, drought, flood, disaster or shock keyword. "Climate shocks" appears on 44 papers, 32 of them in economics. In the management journals, "inclusive growth" (6 papers in July–September 2026 against about 1 expected) and "developing countries" are rising.

## Questions

- After droughts or floods, do households with mobile money receive more remittances, and faster?
- Does that protect their consumption, their assets (livestock, land) and their children's schooling?
- Does the effect hold where agent networks are thin, or does the shock knock out the network itself?

## Data that could help

Geocoded household surveys (LSMS, DHS), rainfall and flood data (ERA5, satellite flood maps), and mobile money agent locations and transactions where available.

## Next step

Merge household panels from one East African country with rainfall shocks and the households' mobile money use, and compare how much consumption falls after droughts.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| mobile money | 1 | #2881 | 0, 3, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2, 1 | 42 |
| financial inclusion | 9 | #149 | 4, 7, 4, 9, 14, 16, 11, 8, 10, 20, 10, 10, 9, 16, 19, 13, 13, 19, 17, 14, 11, 14, 11, 15, 15, 27, 21, 15, 17, 14, 13, 16, 16, 22, 20, 16, 9 | 506 |
| climate shocks | 1 | #2881 | 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 3, 1, 1, 0, 0, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1, 2, 0, 4, 0, 2, 3, 7, 3, 5, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1 | 79 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Mobile money as insurance against climate shocks. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/mobile-money-as-climate-insurance

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-mobile-money-as-climate-insurance,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Mobile money as insurance against climate shocks},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/mobile-money-as-climate-insurance}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).