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> Posted by V. McIntyre, Freelance Writer for the Harvard Kennedy School
Often, we hold out hope that innovation will happen through the great leap forward, the stroke of luck, the miracle cure – and when one candidate fails, we go off in search of another.
There is justifiable concern that this yes-or-no approach hampers international development. A recent article in the New Republic listed “big ideas” in international development that failed – not because they were bad, but because they were big. The article describes a $15 million-plus project to install thousands of water pumps attached to merry-go-rounds in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Jeffrey Sachs’s Millennium Villages which sought to overhaul entire villages by building housing, schools, clinics, roads, and other key infrastructure. In these and the article’s other cases, with expectations high and money and attention flowing in, the projects sank, often because they outgrew the scale at which they had proven to work. Yet some of a project’s apparent lack of success may simply come down to the measurement you’re using. Many of the world’s most successful development efforts – deworming campaigns, for example – only improve the average life in tiny increments.
> Posted by V. McIntyre, Freelance Writer for the Harvard Kennedy School
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
Here’s a financial inclusion puzzle for you. In marketplaces in Peru, small shop owners often take out loans from illegal and possibly dangerous lenders, gangs that operate on motorcycles. Cheaper and safer legal lending channels are available to these customers, but they don’t use them. How would you design a product that would draw these borrowers into the formal sector?
This was the question Guillermo Palomino, chairman of the microlending organization Edpyme La Cruz in Peru and advisor to several Latin American MFIs, brought to small group discussions in the Rethinking Financial Inclusion: Smart Design for Policy and Practice program offered by Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education.
The first step was to develop a clear statement of the problem: use of illegal loans may endanger customers and exposes them to high interest rates and it may also expose their communities to increased criminality. Palomino explains, “The customer has no legal contract, no real knowledge of what the interest rate is, what the penalties are, when they might be applied, or what might happen if they default with these lenders.”
However, an effective solution would involve understanding the appeal of illegal loans. The HKS group worked to define the factors contributing to the problem, both at the surface and at deeper levels.
In essence, the formal sector was not offering customers the ease they required. With the illegal lenders, Palomino explains, “You call a cell phone and a guy shows up on a motorcycle with a little bag. He’ll give you $500 and say, ‘Okay, I’ll be back next week.’” Formal loans, in contrast, require signatures, background checks, address verification, and projected cash flow. These are minor hassles for some, like the formally-employed rich, but major hurdles for the poor. As Palomino describes, “These microbusinesses don’t have people to handle paperwork, go back and forth for signatures or pick up money—because then who takes care of selling the apples or bags of rice?” In probing for underlying causes, the small groups discussed how the regulatory demands pertaining to the loan approval process also present a challenge.
> Posted by V. McIntyre, Freelance Writer for the Harvard Kennedy School
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
Enthusiasm for mobile money among the financial inclusion community is generally high, but like with most topics, when you pierce beyond the surface-level praises, the tone of the conversation becomes more mixed. As Harvard Business School professor Shawn Cole stated on day three of the HKS Executive Education course Rethinking Financial Inclusion, “Mobile money has been next year’s big thing for the last ten years.”
Comments on disappointing levels of mobile money services uptake are common, and are often paired with another dominant piece in the mobile money narrative: M-Pesa’s runaway success in Kenya. Since its introduction in 2007, M-Pesa has been taken up by 70 percent of the country’s population. And as the professors pointed out, of those who used M-Pesa in the last 12 months, 43 percent did not have formal bank accounts. This statistic exhibits how mobile money provides financial services to many who might not otherwise have them. The statistic also alludes to the question of whether the service is a good on-ramp to more financial services. Questions about on-ramps and services uptake are essential to the mobile money and financial inclusion conversations at the heart of discussions throughout the weeklong HKS program. Balancing such questions were conversations that illustrated clear, and perhaps surprising, benefits of mobile money.
Jenny Aker, a professor at Tufts University, cited a study that took place during a drought in Niger which showed that distributing government aid via mobile money versus cash not only cut costs, it increased diet diversity. In this case, when women received their government benefits through their phones, they had greater control over the use of the money, and this affected household decision-making. The study also demonstrated that with mobile money the distribution and receiving of funds was cheaper for government and the recipients.
In addition, mobile money helps users weather economic shocks. Tavneet Suri, MIT professor and scientific director of J-PAL Africa, presented the results of a study of several thousand Kenyans she conducted with William Jack of Georgetown University. It showed that M-Pesa users are better able to share risk through an increase in remittances received and a higher diversity of senders. A shock that reduces consumption of a non-user by 21 percent reduces consumption by M-Pesa users by only 11 percent. Mobile money dramatically increases the size and breadth of the user’s safety net: Suri estimates the insurance value of M-Pesa at around 3-4 percent of the user’s income.
> Posted by V. McIntyre, Freelance Writer for the Harvard Kennedy School
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
“Know your client” is a popular phrase in conversations about financial inclusion and business in general. But where does such knowledge come from? Does it end with your client’s expressed needs and desires? Can it also incorporate behavioral research insights or consumer protections that the client may not even demand?
Shawn Cole of Harvard Business School opened the second day of “Rethinking Financial Inclusion” – a one-week program offered by Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education – with a question all providers might ask themselves when modifying existing products or developing new ones: “If you were the customer, would you go for that deal?”
Cole pointed out that products meant to “bank the unbanked” (i.e., first-time users) must be designed differently from products meant to tempt new customers away from competitors. He described the experience of First National Bank of South Africa in responding to government calls to encourage savings among the poor and draw black South Africans into the predominantly white formal banking sector. First National Bank decided to offer a lottery with large prizes to new depositors.
In debating whether a lottery would attract customers, participants cited examples from their own work, such as a mobile money account offering free insurance to savers who maintain a sufficient balance in their accounts. Recognizing that the poor are already saving, informally, the challenge is to develop products that draw them into the formal sector safely and responsibly. Another provider warned against complicated offers. “Structured products can be very esoteric.”
The concerns participants voiced fell into two categories: ones that apply to anyone (e.g. for nearly everyone a flashy new product loses its luster after the third page of terms and conditions), and ones that are specific to the poor (e.g. how do you draw people into banking, when even walking into the building itself is intimidating?). Both sets of concerns underline the need for financial capability development and customer-centered product innovation. The potential interest in formal financial products may be there, but uptake is obstructed by consumers’ lack of confidence, or poor understanding of the products’ components, or inability to surmount intimidating “barriers to entry” such as small print. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by V. McIntyre, Freelance Writer for the Harvard Kennedy School
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
On February 23, Rohini Pande opened classroom sessions of “Rethinking Financial Inclusion” – a one-week program offered by Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education – by drawing a distinction between two models of change: the magic bullet and penicillin. The magic bullet is an unstoppable cure-all. It takes down whatever problem you set your sights on. Penicillin is the product of many cycles of experimentation, refinement, and the occasional stroke of luck. (Researchers found the best strand of the penicillin fungus on a moldy cantaloupe from an Illinois market.) Magic bullets solve problems in German folk tales, penicillin in the real world.
Pande spoke to a group of 45 participants – leaders of government ministries, MFIs, banks, and NGOs from 29 countries (click here for a breakdown). She said that the hope that microcredit could, by itself, lift very different poor populations out of poverty – a hope initially bolstered by quick spread and high repayment rates – appears to have included some magical thinking. Given microcredit’s disappointing performance according to metrics such as new business creation and development indicators, the challenge now is to put it through a penicillin-style process of trial, error, and re-trial – including testing its effects in combination with a broader range of products.
The penicillin metaphor allowed Pande to place early emphasis on the value of evidence-driven (re)design in policy, a theme that would be frequently revisited throughout the week. By citing the rising use of rigorous evaluations as a policy instrument, she turned the moral of the cautionary tale from a statement about microcredit specifically to a much more general maxim: “Don’t trust the quick and easy result.”
The other products that the “Rethinking Financial Inclusion” program promised to focus on, such as savings and insurance facilities and new payments mechanisms, must also be put through the same process of experimentation and evaluation, Pande said.
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