Editor's Note: It's been a bit more than four years that I've been writing the faiV and though I probably haven't had as many links as minutes in a year, it's a safe bet that there have been more than 200 faiVs and 4000 links in that time. So I took a bit of an unannounced hiatus for the month. I hope you missed the faiV. . . .
If you did, and you'd be interested in being part of a feedback panel that we are putting together to help us make decisions about the future of the faiV, please just respond to this email. And if you missed us but think the faiV is already perfect, feel free to respond to say that, but more importantly, please tell a few friends and colleagues to subscribe. . . .
In public services announcements, there are a couple of research funding opportunities that may be of interest to you: a) UNESCAP has a new RFP for evidence-based interventions to support women entrepreneurs (in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Fiji, Nepal, Samoa, or Vietnam); and b) ANDE and the Canadian IDRC have a call for Expressions of Interest on studying the experiences of women in venture accelerators in Latin America and SSA. . . .
--Tim Ogden . . .
Read MoreEditor's Note: I recently learned that my paper with Michael Clemens (that one I referred to last week that took 5 years from submission to publication) on rethinking migration from the perspective of household finance is among the top 10% of downloads at Development Policy Review so if you're eager to read something non-pandemic check it out. Apparently at least a few other people have done so. And the paper on what is happening with microcredit in Pakistan is now officially published. . . .
–Tim Ogden . . .
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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 MoreThis edition of the faiVLive featured Tim Ogden, Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative at NYU shared the latest insights on SME business training programs, with guest speaker David McKenzie, Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, Finance and Private Sector Development Unit at the World Bank. Tim and David discussed what we know about small business performance and productivity, the importance of management, and training impact evaluations--all essential for innovating SME training programs. . . .
Read More1. SMEs: So this is kind of old, at least in faiV terms. But it's new to me, and a good illustration of one of the fundamental ideas that underpins how I look at all research/interventions related to SMEs: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The point the author is making is quite different from what I take from it, so let me explain a bit more. Figuring out how to run a small business, in most contexts where we care about helping people running small businesses--developing countries, marginalized groups or areas in developed countries, other people markets and regulation have failed--is really, really hard because there is a surprising amount of detail at every step in the process. Product, location, competition, marketing, production, accounting, financing, investment--all of them involve a surprising amount of detail, and lots of little ways to get things wrong. But with so much detail it's hard to figure out if something is going wrong, much less what specific thing is going wrong.
At this surprising level of detail we tend to throw programs that either only address one small detail (e.g. incentives for formalization), or lots of details spread out across many tasks (e.g. business training). In both cases we see small or negligible effects for the most part (in part because most impact evaluations of training don't have nearly enough power to detect the size of change we could reasonably expect).
That's a fairly long disquisition to set up that the next faiVLive will be on the topic of SME business training specifically. On February 20th, at 10am Eastern, David McKenzie and I will discuss what we know about SME performance, management, survival and especially training. Register to join us here.
Finally, while I remain one of the holdouts against the . . .
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