Editor's Note: You're not hallucinating, experiencing a weird time warp or flashback. But maybe I am.
- Tim Ogden
1. What the hell?
Yes, this is a new faiV, for the first time since [checks notes; checks notes again; checks calendar on current date; checks calendar on current date and year; hangs head in shame and disbelief] June, 2021. So, you (and I) could hardly be blamed for asking "What the hell happened?" The answer is complicated but mostly prosaic: my time has been focused on a seven-country financial diaries study, and three or four other field work projects that we've been running or participating in. But it's also that the world that the faiV existed in and was a part of has changed a lot. Here I don't mean the pandemic etc., at least not directly. I mean that the world of information creation and sharing has changed dramatically. As we contemplated reviving the faiV at various times in 2022 and 2023, we kept running into barriers like: what platform should we be using? What's getting through email filters now? How do we gather the information to write a faiV? Where are people posting now? . . .
Viewing all posts with tag: Mobile Money
Part 2 on The Role of Digital Money in Financial Inclusion
Back for a second run, Tim Ogden and Jesse McWaters of Mastercard continued their conversation on digital money, and grappled with questions focused on applications of digital currency to advance financial inclusion, cybersecurity, and the interplay between regulation, consumer protection and innovation. . . .
Read MorePart 1 on The Role of Digital Money in Financial Inclusion
In this edition of the faiVLive, the Financial Access Initiative’s Tim Ogden and Jesse McWaters, the Global Head of Regulatory Advocacy at Mastercard, explored basic frameworks for understanding the differences between the rapidly growing types of digital currencies. They covered new and evolving digital means of exchange, how they interact, and what that means for pro-poor financial inclusion. . . .
Read MoreWeek of June 26th, 2020 (faiVLive)
This week’s faiV was a faiVLive — a webinar featuring a panel of experts discussing the future of digital financial services and inclusion. . . .
Thanks to everyone who joined our faiVLive webinar about the future of Digital Financial Services on June 26th. If you weren’t able to join us live, you can watch a recording of the webinar through this link. . . .
About the webinar:
The pandemic has raised the profile of digital financial services, which have enabled amazingly rapid distribution of social support funds and may provide a path forward for delivering financial services safely and at scale. But there are important questions left to consider about the roll-out and ultimate impact of DFS. This edition of faiVLive brings together expert practitioners and researchers to address these questions, ranging from the impact of DFS on MFIs to digital security. . . .
Moderator:
Timothy Ogden, Managing Director of the NYU Financial Access Initiative . . .
Featuring:
Tamara Cook, CEO, FSDKenya . . .
Salah Goss, SVP, Government & Development, Mastercard . . .
Moonmoon Shehrin, Digital Cluster Manager, Microfinance, BRAC . . .
Gregory Chen, Lead Financial Sector Specialist, CGAP . . .
Graham Wright, Group Managing Director, MSC . . .
Support:
This faiVLive is supported by the Mastercard Impact fund, and in collaboration with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth . . .
Week of April 3, 2020
Editor's Note: The only two predictions I feel I confident in making right now are that a) we will find some new phrase for opening a conversation other than "How are you?" or at least some new way to answer the question, and b) that the trend of putting webcams on the bottom of a laptop screen is over. Thanks to all of you who reached out in reaction to the abbreviated version of the faiV last week focused on my concerns about the future of microfinance in the US and globally. Please keep sending information and thoughts my way. . . .
Read MoreWeek of December 13, 2019
1. Global Development: In my early days of blogging global development and philanthropy stuff, the Millennium Villages Project--and specifically the controversy over claims of impact and whether to measure impact at all--were a really big deal. In a true blast from the past, the impact evaluation of a Ghanaian MVP has finally been published and found little to no impact. Little to no impact on core welfare indicators and little to no impact on spillovers or "cost-saving synergies." That impact evaluation only happened because Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes went to the mat to convince DfID not to fund expansion unless it included independent evaluation. Here's a thread from Demombynes on that, and one from Clemens. It's worth noting that the MVP not only actively resisted impact evaluation but threatened Clemens and Demombynes with a lawsuit to stop their efforts.
I've been thinking about this a lot in relation to criticism of the RCT movement around the recently awarded Nobel prizes. This paper isn't an RCT--it's a Diff-in-Diff with matched villages and propensity score matching! The point is the distance we have traveled in terms of demanding credible evidence on development interventions in a very short period of time is underappreciated. It was less than a decade ago that literally the highest profile development intervention in the world was insisting that there was no need for an impact evaluation, a control group, etc. and there was actual controversy over that position. And I do think that the randomistas are largely responsible for that change where the debate is about the relative credibility and cost-benefit of different approaches to measuring impact, and external validity of findings, not on whether to engage in credible impact evaluation.
There are other controversies from the global development past that are resurfacing, if . . .
Week of December 6, 2019
1. Trends: Futurism has always come more easily to technologists than policy wonks (probably because it’s easier). But big gatherings are a good chance to look ahead to how the whole inclusive finance ecosystem, getting more complex each year, will evolve. e-MFP’s annual survey of financial inclusion trends – the Financial Inclusion Compass 2019 – was launched during EMW2019, and tries to do just this. If there were a single theme to this paper, it’s the disconnect between, on the one hand, individual stakeholders with their own interests and objectives, and on the other a collective confusion, a ‘soul-searching’ of sorts, for financial inclusion’s purpose amidst the panoply of initiatives and indicators in a sector of now bewildering complexity. . . .
Digital transformation of institutions ranked top, a theme that dominated last year’s European Microfinance Award (EMA) and EMW, with Graham Wright’s keynote call for MFIs to “Digitise or Die!” (and see also the FinDev webinar series on the subject). Client protection remains at the forefront, (second in the rankings, see point 4 below for more going on here) and client-side digital innovations, despite the ubiquitous hype, is only in third overall – and only 7th among practitioners, who actually have to implement FinTech for clients. Do they know something that consultants and investors do not? Among New Areas of Focus (which looks 5-10 years down the track), Agri-Finance is clearly top. The Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab, Mastercard Foundation and ISF Advisors’ Pathways to Prosperity presents the current state-of-the-sector. It’s worth looking at. Finally, Social Performance and/or Impact Measurement is 5th out of 20 trends. There’s too much to choose from here. But the CGAP blog on impact and evidence digs into the subject from a whole range of angles. And check out Tim’s CDC paper [No quid pro quo!--Tim] from earlier this year on the impact of investing in financial systems. Good to see that financial regulators are also giving this the attention it needs. . . .
Finally, finance for refugees and displaced populations generated a lot of comments in the Compass - and was the biggest jumper in the New Area of Focus rankings. It’s been a big part of EMW for the last few years; climate migration was the theme of the excellent conference opening keynote by Tim McDonnell, journalist and National Geographic Explorer, and there’s lots of recent data (here in a World Bank blog) showing refugee numbers at (modern) record levels. Migration of course is inextricably linked to labor conditions. Low paid and low quality work drives migration [maybe we should have more research on migration as a household finance strategy--Tim]. For more on the ‘World of Work’ in the coming century, see below. . . .
2. Climate Change: There may be more evolution in climate change/climate finance than any other area of financial inclusion today. From our side, the European Microfinance Award 2019 on ‘Strengthening Climate Change Resilience’ wrapped up last month, with APA Insurance Ltd of Kenya chosen as the winner for insuring pastoralists against forage deterioration that result in livestock deaths due to droughts . Forage availability is determined by satellite data, via the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). A short video on the program can be seen here. . . .
The severity of climate change and the increasing impact it has on the world’s most vulnerable hardly needs outlining here. Progress has been excruciatingly slow. But a new report by the Global Commission on Adaptation, headed by Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, aims to change that. Released in September 2019, it mapped out a $1.8 trillion blueprint to ready the world to withstand intensifying climate impacts. The Commission launched the report in a dozen capitals, with the overarching goal of jolting governments and businesses into action. . . .
A bunch of recent publications illustrate the overdue acceleration of responses. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Climate Change Resilience Index is pretty stark reading. Africa will be hit the hardest by climate change according to the Index – with 4.7% real GDP loss by 2050 (well supported by the rankings in the ND-Gain index from Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), which summarizes countries’ vulnerability to (and readiness for) climate change. The EIU index shows that institutional quality matters a lot in minimising the effects. The paper also presents three case studies that highlight the importance of both economic development and policy effectiveness to tackle climate change. It’s worth a (fairly frightening) read. So is AFI’s new paper “Inclusive green finance: a survey of the policy landscape”, which asks and answers why financial regulators are working on climate change, how they have been integrating climate change concerns in their national financial inclusion policies and other financial sector strategies, and how they are collaborating with national agencies or institutions. Blue Orchard has also just published "Rethinking Climate Finance" which points to a US$400 billion shortfall by 2030 in climate finance, just to keep global temperatures within the 1.5 Celsius limit. The authors advocate various blended-finance products to encourage private sector investment, which, their survey reveals, is woefully low considering how significantly those investors perceive climate change risk to their portfolios. . . .
Read MoreWeek of November 12, 2019
1. Good Economics: I’m pretty jealous of the luck that the editor who signed Esther and Abhijit to write a new book with a big picture view of economics and development and managed to have it scheduled to come out just a few weeks after they won the Nobel has (or alternatively I’m not jealous at all of the eternity of suffering they will have from selling their soul to make this happen). It is pretty remarkable timing regardless of how it came about.
The official release isn't until later this week, but there’s already a good amount of stuff out there, and the book seems likely to generate a lot of conversation. Here’s an excerpt that outlines their perspective on migration (it’s good and there should be more of it). Here’s an excerpt of their perspective on trade (it’s not as good as you’ve heard). Here’s a thread from David McKenzie contrasting the two.
I’m told a review copy is headed my way, and if so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the book in future weeks.
2. Global Development: It feels like quite some time since I’ve been able to feature some big picture things happening in the development space. So here’s a round-up of some pretty diverse things on that front.
David Malpass has been in charge at the World Bank for long enough to start seeing some changes. Here’s a perspective on how the annual meetings were different this time around. And here’s a piece on how Malpass seems to be trying to shift toward more attention at the individual country level than on global or regional issues. I guess no one will be surprised if the Bank does little on the climate change front while he is in charge.
It’s been well more than a decade of pretty . . .
Week of October 25, 2019
1. US Household Finance (and Great Convergence/Corrupted Economy): If you've been paying attention to global news, you have no doubt deduced a pattern that many are remarking on: mass protests in many countries that are linked in more than trivial ways to the cost of living, corrupted economies and frustration with a subverted political process: Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Hong Kong are just a few. Here's the New York Times on that pattern with discussion of similar situations in nearly 10 more countries.
In the sense that these episodes of mass unrest stem back to "pocketbook" issues the United States is an outlier--not that the cost of living and unequal access to opportunity aren't issues--but that they haven't yet lead to mass uprisings. There are lots of reasons for that of course, including relatively low unemployment and at least some consistent economic growth. But the underlying issues just aren't that different. Here's a new report from the JP Morgan Chase Institute on how much savings US households need to weather the typical ups and downs in their income and spending needs. There's a lot to dig into in the report, and I'm still not convinced we understand volatility enough to offer prescriptions, but this is a big step in the right direction. The report finds that US families need 6 weeks of take-home income to weather a simultaneously income dip and expense spike, and that 65 percent of households don't have that.
For a more personal take on how budgets are being squeezed, here's the NYT with a in-depth look at four households' budgets.
2. SMEs: The way I see things there are two research questions at the top of the agenda: 1) What distinguishes SMEs/entrepreneurs that grow, and create net new jobs and long-lived profitable businesses (I honestly care less about high growth . . .
Week of September 27, 2019
1. Jobs: I've written a good bit here on the "Great Convergence" from the perspective of financial inclusion--that the US and middle-income countries have more in common in that domain than they have ever had--but another version of the "Great Convergence" is the common focus on jobs in countries across the per-capita income spectrum.
It's useful to put the current convergence in historical perspective--the recognition that creating jobs was critical and that "national champion" industrial development was not creating them played a large role in the development of the microfinance movement. The failure of microcredit to produce much beyond self-employment alternatives to casual labor has brought job creation, and especially job creation through SMEs, back to the top of the agenda of international development. At the same time, the failure of richer economies to produce very many "quality" jobs in the 10 years since the Great Recession (and arguably since the 1970s) or for the foreseeable future has put the question of jobs at the top of the list of concerns for policymakers in those countries.
Paddy Carter, the director of research for CDC (UK, not US), and Petr Sedlacek have a new report on how DFIs and social investors should think about job creation that lays out some of the issues (e.g. boosting productivity can both create and destroy jobs) quite nicely. MIT's "Work of the Future Task Force" also has a new report, this more from the perspective of policymakers in wealthier countries, with a call to focus on job quality more than job quantity. Stephen Greenhouse has a new book on dignity at work, which of course has a lot to do with job quality. Here's a talk he gave recently at Aspen's Economic Opportunities Program.
Seema Jayachandran has a new working paper on a specific part of the . . .
