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> Posted by Shannon Mudd, Coordinator, Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative, Haverford College
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to Sonja E. Kelly, Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
What factors determine where microfinance institutions (MFI’s) locate their branches – and where they do not? A group of students at Haverford College set out to explore this question, initially focusing their efforts on Uganda.
The project grew out of a conversation with Susy Cheston of CFI about who is excluded from financial services and whether maps might help us understand more about who these excluded are and the challenges in reaching them. As coordinator of Haverford’s new Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative (MI3) I was seeking ways to engage students in research that bridged theory and practice. Recalling that our new Librarian had previously been involved in a mapping project, I returned to Haverford to see what resources we might bring to bear. I discovered that we had the right software, a skilled and supportive library and, best of all, some terrific students in the Microfinance Consulting Club who were willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work (properly fueled by pizza, carrots and seltzer water).
Why Uganda? Not surprisingly, such an effort is largely driven by data availability. We became aware of a directory of MFI branches in Uganda published by the Association of Microfinance Institutions of Uganda (special thanks to Scott Gaul of TheMIX.org!). The directory provided us with district level locations across Uganda’s 100 districts). Additional research helped us to further refine locations for a majority of the branches. We then looked for sub-national socio-economic data that we could turn into map layers to conduct our analysis. The product of our initial efforts has been posted here.
> Posted by Vishnu Sridharan, Program Associate, New America Foundation
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to Sonja E. Kelly, Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
Since the launch of Mexico’s first conditional cash transfer program in 1997, governments from Nicaragua to Nigeria have adopted similar approaches to mitigate the worst effects of poverty. In fact, the New America Foundation’s Global Savings and Social Protection Database–which currently focuses on Latin America, Africa, and Asia–has identified over 90 cash transfer programs in 45 countries in the developing world, with over half a billion beneficiaries. In the past 3 years alone, as the map below shows, 15 cash transfer programs have been started, expanded or redefined, which gives us some indication of these programs effectiveness and feasibility. Read the rest of this entry »
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