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> Posted by Center Staff
> Posted by Madeleine Dy, International Programs Manager, Water.org
More than 100 leaders from the water, sanitation, and finance sectors came together October 21-22, 2014 for the second East Africa WaterCredit Forum in Nairobi to share progress made and to brainstorm lasting solutions to the water and sanitation crisis affecting East Africa. In Kenya, for example, access to safe water supplies is 59 percent and access to improved sanitation is 32 percent.
Water.org, in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation, convened the Forum, part of Water.org’s five-year collaboration with the Foundation to bring safe water and sanitation to economically challenged communities in East Africa through the WaterCredit approach. Since 2010, the WaterCredit initiative in Kenya and Uganda has empowered almost 115,000 people to obtain financing from seven financial institutions (FIs) for long‐term, sustainable water and sanitation solutions.
> Posted by Sumaiya Sajjad, Program Manager, Financial Inclusion, The MasterCard Foundation
In Luxembourg recently, I took part in the European Microfinance Week, whose theme this year was “Developing Markets Better”. The event brought together an excellent group of people from various organizations around the world involved in financial inclusion. On the evening before the formal opening of the conference, Accion’s Center for Financial Inclusion hosted a special cocktail reception where I helped to launch the Accion Africa Board Fellowship program – proudly supported by The MasterCard Foundation.
This program aligns strongly with our Foundation’s goal of promoting financial inclusion in order to help catalyze prosperity and reduce inequality in developing countries. As part of that work, we recognize the critical importance of building capacity at all levels of the financial services industry – especially in that segment of the industry serving the poor. We’ve found that strong, committed, and capable leadership can have the most catalyzing effect on entire organizations, improving the quality of their work, and benefiting the clients they serve.
> Posted by John Gitau, CEO, Kenya Financial Education Centre
Written in 1910, a tiny book, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles has relevance today in our financial inclusion efforts.
In one of the chapters, “How To Use the Will,” the author writes, “What tends to do away with poverty is not the getting of pictures of poverty into your mind but getting pictures of wealth into the minds of the poor. You are not deserting the poor in their misery when you refuse to allow your mind to be filled with pictures of that misery. Poverty can be done away with, not by increasing the number of well to do people who think about poverty, but by increasing the number of people who purpose with faith to get rich. If you want to help the poor, demonstrate to them that they can become rich; prove it by getting rich yourself.”
These words were written at a time when the American Titans of Industry – Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller – were generating millions of dollars from oil, steel, and commodities trading. The existence of poverty alongside such epochal abundance must have shocked Wallace Wattles deeply. He must have also witnessed the proliferation of poverty eradication efforts through charity and noted their failure or absence of impact.
> Posted by Ariel Schwartz, Senior Editor, Co.Exist
The following post was originally published on Fast Company’s Co.Exist.
The challenge was simple, or so it seemed: Pay my bills and complete a handful of money-related errands before my work shift began at noon. It was harder than I ever could have imagined.
In reality, I wasn’t handling my own finances; I was participating in a simulation of what it’s like to be one of the underbanked—that is, to be one of the 7.7 percent of Americans with limited access to traditional banking services. The Financial Solutions Lab, a spin-off of the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), put on the simulation for a group of entrepreneurs, nonprofit employees, and banking executives so that they could come up with new product ideas for addressing the challenges of cash flow management.
> Posted by Alissa Fishbane and Allison Daminger, Ideas42
What does it take to successfully design, pilot, and scale an effective new financial product or service? Much more than most would realize! That’s why CFI’s recent behavioral insights workshop in Bogota, Colombia, had a clear focus: understanding the challenges of applying behavioral science to the operations of Latin American financial institutions. CFI asked ideas42 to kick off the day with an overview of behavioral science and its implications for the design and scale-up of financial products.
At ideas42, we use insights from behavioral science to diagnose behavioral bottlenecks preventing people from taking their desired actions, and design remedies that help organizations overcome them. We then measure the impact of these remedies through a randomized evaluation before they are fully scaled. Any successful program that hinges on people’s decisions and actions, as nearly all consumer finance initiatives do, requires a behavioral approach. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Monica Brand Engel and Jackson Scher, Managing Director and Program Coordinator, Frontier Investments Group, Accion
Innovative payment solutions are proliferating globally. Enabled by the exponential expansion of mobile phones, social media, “big data”, and internet access, financial players throughout the world are inventing new ways to complete transactions. Disruptive innovations such as prepaid options, NFC-enabled payments, and cryptocurrencies are gaining significant adoption and are changing the payments space. These trends are especially pronounced in emerging markets where many new entrants have chosen to “leapfrog” traditional, resource-intensive systems and dive directly into the seamless and nimble world of digital financial services. Although these exciting innovations in digital payments have the potential to increase convenience for customers and dramatically reduce costs, some challenges remain. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
Last week the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced substantial increases throughout the country’s microfinance market: growth in the volume of loans dispersed to microentrepreneurs, in the number of microcredit institutions offering savings services, and in the return on equity of rural banks with microfinance operations. Concerning regulation and institutional support, the recently released 2014 Global Microscope found that the Philippines has the best environment in Asia for financial inclusion.
In 2014, loans extended to microentrepreneurs in the Philippines totaled P9.3 billion (US$209 million) as of June, according to figures reported by BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. at the recent Citi Microentrepreneurship Awards in Manila – a roughly 7 percent increase over last year’s figure. On savings, in early 2012 only 22 banks in the country offered micro-deposit accounts. Now, 69 of the Philippines’ 183 banks with microcredit operations take deposits, with a total of 1.7 million micro-deposit accounts. Beyond credit and savings, 86 of the country’s institutions offering microcredit also provide microinsurance and 26 provide electronic banking services.
> Posted by John Gitau, CEO, Kenya Financial Education Centre
View image | gettyimages.com
What are the sources of income for the poor surviving on two dollars a day? While every financial inclusion advocate wants to recommend savings, credit, and insurance products to the poor, offered by the formal financial institutions, there is a loud silence on the earning component of financial capability.
Could the silence be judged as complacent satisfaction that the earnings currently available are good enough? Suffice it to say that even though the current financial products do not produce income for the users, if they are well designed, they should facilitate the earning of income and certainly the use of income in money management. However, we do realize that if we want to talk of increasing income, we are onto a whole different development agenda: livelihood.
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