CGAP was established in 1995, under a slightly different name
Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, in promoting and managing the microcredit sector. Its self-imposed goals were to promote the institutional development and commercialisation of the sector and to improve the regulatory environment. In the early 2000s, CGAP changed its name to the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor. The founding members were the World Bank and nine other governmental and international development organisations. The World Bank is the initiator and main funder, although its share of the budget has steadily declined, falling below 20 per cent in 2013. CGAP was instrumental in establishing the concept of financial inclusion and formulating its agenda. Since 2008, CGAP has increasingly replaced the almost exclusive use of the term microfinance with the term financial inclusion. This term describes the increased use of and improved access for all people to cashless, primarily digital, financial services in the formal financial sector. At the invitation of the
G20, CGAP played a key role in drafting the policy paper for the G20
Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) in 2010. The new terminology in the goal was also intended to reflect a change in the focus of the programme, which was linked to microcredit over-indebtedness crises in India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Morocco, Nicaragua and Pakistan, among others. These erupted from around 2008 because commercial microfinance providers had been very aggressive in pushing high-cost loans onto the market without adequately assessing the ability of their poor clients to repay them. CGAP's priority should, therefore, no longer be access to credit and other services but the responsible provision of these services. == Collaboration and membership overlap ==