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> Posted by Caitlin Sanford, Bankable Frontier Associates
“Although Paula is experiencing economic difficulties, she says that she will stretch the little money she has to cover household expenses.” -Field researcher’s qualitative journal
Today the Mexican Ministry of Finance (Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público), the federal development bank BANSEFI (Banco del Ahorro Nacional y Servicios Financieros), the MetLife Foundation, and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) release the results of the Mexico Financial Diaries at an event at the library at the National Palace in Mexico City. The Mexico Financial Diaries, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, tracked cash flows of 185 families located on the outskirts of Mexico City, in a small town in Puebla, and in a rural Mixteco community in Oaxaca over the course of about 11 months.
Mexico is the first Latin American country where this Financial Diaries methodology has been used to collect fine-grained household finance data. These data add to the growing compendium of Financial Diaries data from Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Mozambique, Pakistan (all implemented by BFA and partners), the U.S. (implemented by NYU’s Financial Access Initiative and the Center for Financial Services Innovation), and Zambia (implemented by Microfinance Opportunities).
> Posted by Eric Noggle, Research Director, Microfinance Opportunities
In 2014, Financial Sector Deepening Zambia and Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) began the Zambia Financial Diaries—a 52-week study of the financial lives of 352 low-income Zambians. The study included 92 smallholder farmers—individuals who own small plots of land on which they grew crops or tended livestock for sale and/or subsistence.
The Zambian smallholder farmers represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 500 million smallholder households worldwide. Smallholder farmers are a large livelihood group and addressing their diverse needs—from crop diversification to market integration—is a strategic priority for the World Bank Group, country-level governments, and non-government organizations.
Understanding smallholder farmers’ income patterns is critical for designing financial services that meet their financial needs. The common perception of farmers’ income patterns is that they are lumpy and linked to agricultural cycles, but the income patterns identified in MFO’s Zambia Financial Diaries challenge this perception.
Income Patterns
The farmers in MFO’s study had lower and more variable incomes than respondents who earned the majority of their income from informal, off-farm sources (“informal workers”). The farmers had 4.3 income sources on average, often relying on casual labor or running informal shops to supplement their agricultural activities, while informal workers had 3.3 sources. Farmers’ average weekly earnings were low—only about $19 per week on average compared to $50 for informal workers (based on June 2015 exchange rates). The farmers also experienced more week-to-week income variation, as measured by the coefficient of variation (COV), than other respondents who work in the informal economy.
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, CFI
A couple months ago we announced a new program coming out of the Center for Financial Inclusion and Accion designed to produce actionable research for the microfinance and financial inclusion industry. We’ve been busy since, overwhelmed by the positive response we had to our announcement, and torn between many high-quality research proposals.
In recent days we selected four fellows to carry out research that we think will have an influence on the future of financial inclusion. Without further adieu, I would like to introduce you to…
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> Posted by Monique Cohen, Independent Advisor, and Founder of Microfinance Opportunities
When an Equity Bank client in Kenya was asked if she saw value in financial education, she replied without hesitation, “Yes, but I thought it was only for rich people.” Delighted with this ringing endorsement the interviewer never asked her what financial education meant for her. If she had we might have gone down a different track.
Intuitively, financial education seems like a good thing. Many experts will tell you that it or financial capability are important for achieving financial inclusion. Yet, the research tells a contrary story: financial education, building financial literacy, or financial capability interventions in developing countries have little effect on changing financial behaviors, including the uptake and usage of formal financial services. I keep asking: What am I missing in this picture? Why doesn’t it add up? With 12 years of experience in this space I would argue that there is much confusion about what financial education is, what it can do, and what we want it to do.
Financial institutions have much to gain from effective financial education, as, of course, do clients. At present, however, the field is torn between two paradigms – a money management paradigm and a product usage paradigm. Though both have merits, neither gets it quite right. I propose a more client-led perspective as a way to ensure that financial education can become more meaningful for the user.
> Posted by Center Staff
On Wednesday, a new joint-initiative was launched that puts free financial education lessons into the phones of Tigo’s seven million mobile subscribers in Colombia. The service, Su Dinero (Your Money), features online financial education content from Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) tailored to the local Colombian context. Supported by project partners DAI and Souktel, the financial education platform is housed on Facebook’s Internet.org phone application. Though web-based, the app can be accessed by Tigo’s mobile subscribers without cost or data charges due to the businesses’ unique arrangement, aligned with Internet.org’s social mission: extending affordable internet access to the five billion people around the world who don’t have it.
Less than a third of the global population use internet-based financial or commercial services. By and large this isn’t a reflection of a lack of connectivity, as mobile phone reception now covers about 85 percent of the inhabited world, although smart phones penetration is far lower. Internet.org, founded by Facebook in 2013, is out to make internet access 100-times more affordable and increase uptake worldwide by targeting the following barriers: cost of devices; cost of service plans; lack of content in local languages; limited availability of power sources; difficulty in networks supporting large amounts of data; lack of awareness of the value of the internet; and remaining gaps in mobile network connectivity.
> Posted by Guy Stuart and Eric Noggle, Executive Director and Research Officer, Microfinance Opportunities
In our first post in this series, we described the need for an approach to financial education that was both effective and scalable, and we offered embedded education as a potential solution. Our second and third posts described how the embedded education approach works and showed its potential effectiveness by describing the improved money management behavior displayed by clients in Zambia after participating in our program. We believe that these findings also revealed the potential for a business case for delivering financial education using the embedded approach.
For a business case to exist, two things have to be true: financial service providers (FSPs) need to see a positive, bottom-line impact from an embedded program and a financing mechanism needs to exist that can compete with the current grant-based model for funding financial education.
Bottom-Line Impact
Financial education can positively impact financial service providers in a number of ways (aside from knowing that they’re empowering individuals to take control of their financial lives). Offering training could improve client retention by strengthening loyalty. It could reduce customer service requests by increasing familiarity with a banking process. But our market research suggests that the biggest potential impact is lowering write-off ratios and increasing savings balances.
> Posted by Guy Stuart and Eric Noggle, Executive Director and Research Officer, Microfinance Opportunities
Last week’s post discussed how we implemented an embedded education program with VisionFund and Zoona in Zambia that leveraged touch points in an effort to improve clients’ financial capabilities. While we hope this blog series has begun to convince you that embedded education can help solve the financial capability gap, one important issue remains: where is the evidence of success? Does this approach really improve outcomes for clients and businesses?
Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) aimed to add to the knowledge base of “what works” in financial education with our evaluation of the Consumer Education for Branchless Banking (CEBB) project in Zambia. The evaluation applied a mixed-methods approach with multiple data sets. We analyzed information from in-depth interviews, focus groups, knowledge surveys, and transaction data from VisionFund and Zoona’s management information systems.
The data tell a compelling story. Qualitative interviews indicated that both clients and branch staff thought the education program was having a positive impact on how clients were interacting with the branchless banking service and on their overall financial capabilities.
> Posted by Guy Stuart and Julie Lee, Executive Director and Senior Technical Advisor for Financial Education, Microfinance Opportunities
Last week
we highlighted historic challenges to scaling financial education (FE) and offered the embedded education model as one viable solution. The embedded approach has the potential to benefit traditionally under- and unbanked populations and financial service providers (FSPs) alike. Of course, embedded education is about more than simply incorporating educational resources within providers’ existing delivery channels. In large part, the success of embedded education hinges on putting clients at the center of its design and implementation and understanding how financial capability is developed.
The first post in this series raised the importance of adult learning principles (relevance, dialogue, immediacy, and respect, to name a few) for the effective design of educational materials. These principles ensure that materials will reshape consumers’ attitudes and build their knowledge, skills, and self-confidence to act on their financial decisions. The approach is holistic and engaging, providing consumers with the opportunity to dialogue with others as they learn and to wrestle with their questions. The approach also provides the opportunity to apply new knowledge and skills, leveraging moments when consumers are positioned to act on what they are learning – for example, while transacting with the FSP. Finally, the approach ensures that the educational messages are reinforced, so that financial education is not a one-off event and clients are frequently exposed to key messages.
> Posted by Guy Stuart, Ph.D., Executive Director, Microfinance Opportunities
The past few decades have seen an impressive expansion of financial services to the world’s under- and unbanked populations. This expansion has not been without its challenges, including low-income customers of many financial service providers (FSPs) falling into considerable over-indebtedness¹ or signing up for services they do not use.² MFO’s own research³ and the research of others suggest that the limited financial capability of FSP customers is one of the factors behind these challenges. Hundreds of millions of people are gaining access to formal financial services with no education in basic money management principles and ways to maximize the usefulness of the new services to which they have access.4
Extending financial education (FE) to consumers is vital in empowering them to make informed decisions about the financial services they use and how they use them, including avoiding over-indebtedness and signing up for accounts they never use. But reaching the massive number of clients in need of FE in a way that is accessible and practical is a tall order. The Monitor Group report suggests it could cost from $7 billion to $10 billion using traditional, classroom-based approaches to provide education just to those who already have access now —a sum that is 10 to 15 percent of the total current asset base of microfinance institutions worldwide. If access to finance were extended to include the world’s 2.7 billion unbanked, the cost of building financial capability would rise further by a factor of at least three.
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> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
A few weeks ago J.P. Morgan made a $30 million commitment to create the Financial Solutions Lab, a move representative of the growing recognition among all financial stakeholders of the importance of financial capability.
The Financial Solutions Lab, a five-year initiative, will be managed by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and it seeks to bring together experts in behavioral economics, design, technology, and nonprofit services in order to develop innovative and scalable financial products and services that strengthen client financial capability and well-being. Ideo.org and ideas42 are to serve as strategic partners on the initiative. By bringing these stakeholders together, the Lab aims to identify new ways in which customers can improve credit behavior, increase savings, and build assets.
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