Financial Ed, Mobile Money, and Savings – Top Picks of the Microfinance Blogosphere – August 3, 2011

> Posted by Center Staff

The blogosphere’s virtual teeth are chewing over many matters, including financial education and high-tech solutions, that earned ink in the Center’s recent “Opportunities and Obstacles to Financial Inclusion” report.

• Cheryl Heller, writing over at NextBillion, shares her take on a few things every entrepreneur should  know about communication, maintaining that communication “is what transforms an idea into a vision, defines how it’s different, explains why it will work, and engages people in helping make it a reality.”
• Kiva reposts a nice piece by Rachel Brooks, the director of marketing and communications at the MFI Juhudi Kilimo, on her organization’s efforts to bridge service gaps using mobile technology including Safaricom’s M-PESA platform. This is critical, she writes, because one of Juhudi Kilimo’s greatest challenges “is sheer distance.”
• The buzz about financial education is getting louder, as evidenced by The MasterCard Foundation blog post “Moving the Financial Education Needle Forward.” Monique Cohen suggests that policymakers and practitioners in the financial services space “now increasingly recognize the important link between financial education  for low-income groups and their ability to make informed decisions about personal finance for improved well being.”
• Jonathan Morduch and Lindsi Seegmiller mull a recent UK study by the Personal Finance Research Centre that essentially asked low-income citizens “Which mechanisms would you put in place if you wanted to save more?“  The results, say the authors in their post at the Financial Access Initiative, suggest that “simple tweaks to existing structures could matter to people who aren’t saving as much as they want.”
• Over at the CGAP tech blog, Paul Breloff and Sarah Rotman urge those of us here in the US to carefully consider “Financial Inclusion in the US: Spending Some Time In Our Own Backyard.” They note that “As we look globally for innovative business models and technologies, it’s a shame how little we (as two Americans) focus on our backyard in the US.”

Image credit: Iainf

Have you read?

Women, India, and Tourism – Top Picks of the Microfinance Blogosphere – July 19, 2011

Armenia, Andhra Pradesh & Pakistan – Top Picks of the Microfinance Blogosphere – June 13, 2011

India, Agriculture & Savings – Top Picks of the Microfinance Blogosphere – June 1, 2011