Africa

This week, the Global Assets Project (GAP) hosted an event titled “Tracking Progress Toward Financial Inclusion”, where we along with panelists from Mix Market, the World Bank, and Georgetown University presented

The main takeaway from the Global Assets Project’s “Tracking Progress toward Financial Access” event at the New America Foundation this week was that we must learn how to apply the lessons learned from the data to further financial access for the poor.

A version of this post was originally published on NextBillion.net

Kenya’s financial market has caught the world’s attention. The rise of mobile money in Kenya has become the interest of financial inclusion experts, the excitement of mobile network operators, and an opportunity for financial institutions to rethink their products and services. However, the implications and transformative impact of mobile money and other related innovations in the financial landscape are often much less examined and understood.

By Julia Stevens and Li Zou, Center for Social Development

Cross posted on YouthSave.org

On April 17, 2012, a Symposium on International Research and Innovation at Washington University in St. Louis highlighted the experiences and insights of the international research partners in YouthSave. The event, which was hosted by the Center for Social Development at Washington University’s Brown School, drew an engaged audience of students, researchers, and program representatives with interests in international research and collaboration.

Recently, I attended “Conversations that Build and Strengthen Youth Economic Opportunities” hosted by Making Cents International. The event featured Hidde van der Veer of Aflatoun, a Dutch NGO providing social and financial education to children, and Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan of  Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), an organization dedicated to discovering what works for the world’s poor. The speakers shared the preliminary results of their RCT evaluation of the efficacy of school-based financial education programs in Ghana, a country where YouthSave also operates. While their research measured only the short-term effects of these interventions, it nonetheless offers valuable insights into youth labor market participation, risk taking, and most importantly, savings behaviors and attitudes.

By: Corrinne Ngurukie, Save the Children; Moses Njenga, KIPPRA; and Vilma Ilic, Columbia University

Cross-posted on youthsave.org

Last month, the Central Bank of Nigeria began a pilot in Lagos aimed at reducing the high dominance of cash in the economy by imposing limits on cash transactions. In similar fashion, Sweden, through its emphasis on technology and innovation, is likely to become the world’s first cashless economy. The emergence of electronic money (e-money) in these two countries has revived the discourse over the future of cash, but in particular, the rise of e-money has opened the debate about the ways to leverage the benefits of this technology for financial development in the developing world.

Last month, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) held an event on government-to-person (G2P) payments and financial inclusion. The event was based on a February report, “Social Cash Transfers and Financial Inclusion: Evidence from Four Countries,” which itself was a follow up to a 2009 paper “Banking the Poor via G2P payments” on the same topic.

It's 113 years since Rudyard Kipling -- poet propagandist for empire -- exhorted Americans, newly ensconced as the colonial power in the Philippines, to "Take up the White Man's burden/The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease." A century and change later, a new survey suggests people in the rich world have attitudes towards developing countries that would make Kipling proud.