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> Posted by Center Staff
The latest edition of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our weekly online magazine sharing the big news in banking the unbanked, is now available. Among the stories in this week’s edition are the release of a New America Foundation report on account dormancy in youth savings, Yemen exploring mobile banking to combat the hardships of war, and Cambodia launching its first agricultural insurance programs. Here are a few more details:
- The New America report considers how to understand the challenge of youth account dormancy in large-scale account-based initiatives and policy efforts, describing the range of issues related to account engagement from the perspectives of financial institutions, policymakers, and account-holders.
- Yemen, following its central bank passing regulation on e-money and mobile money in December, is looking to the development of digital finance to cover critical services during wartime, as 30 to 40 percent of bank branches are closed.
- The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC) has launched the country’s first agricultural insurance programs, in the form of pilots for the next year and a half, protecting rice farmers against loss from drought and floods.
For more information on these and other stories, read the latest issue of the FI2020 News Feed here, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.
Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to Eric Zuehlke at .
> Posted by Center Staff
It’s common knowledge in the United States that the student loan situation is bad and getting worse, but what are the actual statistics and how severe is this trend? Like other kinds of debt, student debt has innumerable implications for young borrowers, as well as for the country’s recovering economy.
A new report from the New America Foundation inspects undergraduate student loan debt data from the past ten years, compiling borrower rates and amounts, in aggregate and by institution and degree type. The report, The Student Debt Review, draws from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies, a national survey series of student financial aid. Here are some of the report’s main findings:
- More students are indebted. Across all institution and degree types, the percentage of graduates with debt increased from 54 percent in 2004 to 62 percent in 2012. In 2004 there were 1.6 million graduates with debt. By 2012 there were 2.4 million.
- They owe more. Total student loan debt increased by an average of $3,300 between 2008 and 2012 after a period of four years in which it changed only marginally (2004-2008).
- For-profit colleges are a sore spot. Student debt is increasing especially quickly for bachelor’s degree recipients at private for-profit colleges, who now graduate with an average debt of $40,000 and pay $153 more each month than those graduating with bachelor’s degrees at public colleges. A very high proportion of the bachelor’s degree graduates at private for-profit colleges have borrowed (87 percent), compared to public colleges (64 percent).
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
What personal information do you fear will become public? Your financial information? Your health records? Maybe you don’t want all your political leanings to be available for everyone’s gleaning?
Safeguards are taken in nearly all systems that handle personal information to try to keep confidential information confidential. But of course the success of these safeguards varies widely, as they’re contingent on any number of factors. Two such factors that are integral in considering the safety of information are the systems through which they travel and the places where they’re stored. Increasingly, the days of pen, paper, and filing cabinets are gone, and the days of computerized devices, satellites, and servers are here. For data enthusiasts, this creates an ocean of new opportunities. For privacy and security cautioners, this creates an equal number of new threats.
A recent report from the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, Mobile Privacy and Information Security in Global Development Projects investigates concerns regarding personal information privacy and security, specifically within mobile phone-based development projects. The report asserts that by and large there are no best practices or guidelines in this development space, and that key risks here are rarely addressed.
In an effort to combat this, the report highlights pertinent privacy issues raised by such projects, investigates tangible privacy concerns in the developing world, and offers recommendations and best practices to support the integration of privacy safeguards into project planning and implementation.
As you might expect, the paper identifies some of the privacy risks of mobile financial services. Mobile money projects, like many other development initiatives, are often structured as public-private partnerships. As client data is shared between more project partners, the chances for it to be intercepted or leaked increases.
> Posted by Amanda Lotz, Financial Inclusion 2020 Project Coordinator, CFI 
The following post was originally published on the Youth Economic Opportunities blog.
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
In 2011 only 17 percent of young adults (ages 15-24) saved in a formal institution in Nigeria, only 9 percent in Tanzania, and only 1 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These numbers remind us that youth financial inclusion is far from reality in many countries, especially low income countries with rapidly expanding youth populations (as indicated in CFI’s report Looking Through the Demographic Window: Implications for Financial Inclusion.)
Financial Inclusion 2020 (FI2020) at the CFI is building a movement that mobilizes stakeholders around the globe to achieve financial inclusion by the year 2020. As a part of this global campaign, we are focusing on client segments that have specific needs, including youth. FI2020’s working group on Financial Capability, one of five expert working groups creating a Roadmap to Financial Inclusion, shares insights into the group’s findings on youth and financial services:
1. Incorporate what we know about youth learning and behavior change into financial capability intervention design. Habit formation is important – for example, learning to look both ways before crossing a street. Establishing the savings habit early could set youth on a path to lifetime financial capability, according to a report from the New America Foundation. This report outlines the virtuous chain of connections from savings, to asset ownership, which leads to positive emotions and that promotes further sound financial behavior.
2. Providers are well-placed to contribute to youth financial capability building. Providers are uniquely positioned to help young clients develop financial capability. They have access to customers at the teachable moments when information matters most. They already invest in marketing, and a range of client interfaces can be adapted at low cost to provide financial capability messaging, potentially at significant scale. Further, they can design products that incorporate insights from behavioral economics, with features like automatic reminders or rewards. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Julia Arnold, Research Fellow, New America Foundation
Many of the challenges to saving faced by the world’s poorest people were highlighted in the recent Washington Post article “Microsavings Programs Build Wealth, Pennies at a Time.” Among others, the article articulated two especially salient points around microsavings: 1) we know the poor save, and 2) savings can help poor people withstand shocks to their income (such as unexpected medical emergencies or job loss) without going further into debt and poverty. However, low-income people tend to rely on informal methods of savings, often putting their money at risk of being lost, stolen, or ruined by floods or rodents. Having a safe, reliable place to save is both beneficial to and desired by the world’s poorest people.
The Washington Post article included a link to a research study on savings I conducted while at the Grameen Foundation last July. I spent a month in hot, humid, and rainy Varanasi, India, on behalf of Grameen’s Microsavings Initiative, where I had the privilege to meet dozens of Cashpor Microcredit borrowers and savers. Cashpor Microcredit began offering microsavings in July 2011, using mobile phones to bring savings services to its poor, female clients. Curious about whether the mobile phone acted as a barrier to the savings services, I spoke with 65 women who either were current savers or wanted to become savers with Cashpor. My research revealed that Cashpor’s savers faced many challenges to saving, and one of these challenges was the mobile phone. Most women had limited or no access to a phone and many had limited numeracy and literacy. This, combined with low self-confidence, meant that they turned to others, often family members, including children, for help using the devices.
It’s not just low-income adults who can benefit from formal savings mechanisms. Youth can as well. Many youth around the world have access to small, erratic incomes, either as an allowance from their parents or from odd jobs — particularly if those youth are not in school. Low-income youth face many of the same challenges as adults face in terms of informal saving, but in seeking formal savings services, youth face unique regulatory barriers and knowledge deficits that keep them from being able to use formal services when they’re available. These problems are particularly pressing when considering the potential for impact. It is a given that learning to save early and having formal savings accounts help youth manage their income flows and transition into adulthood more easily.
> Posted by Jamie M. Zimmerman, Director, Global Assets Program, New America Foundation
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
Good news for the audacious folks putting forth a vision of financial inclusion by 2020: government-to-person (G2P) payments are poised to serve as a significant on-ramp to financial services for the most excluded populations. In the last decade, the use of cash to alleviate poverty has gained a lot of popularity. Armando Barrientos and David Hulme, authors of the well-received “Just Give Money to the Poor,” have estimated that more than 500 million poor people around the world benefit from cash transfers. Even better news is that these individuals, mostly young women and girls, and many of them among the poorest and most marginalized populations in society, make up a sizable portion of the elusive “bottom billion” – those often deemed “too poor” to effectively take advantage of traditional microfinance services.
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