Financial Inclusion

Education
At HSBC we believe "Education is key to every success". Educational initiatives at HSBC provide opportunities to underprivileged children to explore their untapped potential and equip them with necessary skills and qualifications. Our project support helps children to go to school, learn in a joyful environment and learn to live a healthy life. We also work with young adults to provide vocational training and life skills so that they are able to help themselves lead a productive life.

Life Skills
Life skills programmes supported by HSBC provides tailor made training to underprivileged youth. Youth are enabled to gain access to opportunities for sustainable livelihoods and financial literacy to help them lead a productive life.

Women?s Empowerment
The plight of women in rural India is well documented. The pressure on survival against the backdrop of poor or no education, failing health, low agricultural productivity and degradation of environment, affects women and children the most. In a majority of cases, in the modern India of today, women are still unable to break out of vicious cycle of gender bias, deprivation and victimization, imposed on them, sometimes by tradition, and at other times by their economic environment and compulsions. One way of resolving this dilemma is to devise financial literacy programmes, which intervene in the lives of rural poor women. HSBC supports projects that provide entrepreneurial trainings and information access to make dignified economic opportunities and self-sufficiency a possibility.

Microfinance
HSBC started with a lending programme for small MFIs in 2005, but after having built up a reasonable degree of understanding of this segment, have started offering commercial loan products to Large Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) also to help them provide micro credit to the financially excluded in India. These institutions provide small loans to groups of poor people (mostly women) using well-established micro credit delivery methodologies. We have sanctioned facilities totalling INR 660M between Jan-Apr08 to MFIs and presently the total number of members covered by MFIs, which have accepted our facilities, is 3.2M.

In 2008, we have put in place a microfinance strategy, with the objective of increasing our presence in this segment and building around a lending portfolio, a host of services which can facilitate capacity building, improve operational efficiency and bring the best practices of a transactional banking business to the microfinance domain.

Environment
HSBC India supports nature, habitat and biodiversity conservation, water harvesting and climate change initiatives. These projects are designed to ensure that economic development does not take place at the expense of the environment and the awareness component ensures that a large number of varied audiences are exposed to environmental messages.