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> Posted by Larry Reed, Director, Microcredit Summit Campaign
On February 5, the Microcredit Summit Campaign released Vulnerability: The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, 2013 by announcing that in 2011, 13 million fewer of the world’s poorest families received access to microcredit and other financial services than in 2010. This is the first time since 1998, when the Campaign began tracking this data, that the total number of clients and the number of poorest families reached have declined. We found in our data that the total number of clients fell from 205 million to 195 million and the sub-set of families living in extreme poverty, defined as less than $1.25 a day, fell from 137 million to 124 million. (Visit the report website to learn more.)
I presented the report at a launch event at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., and Susy Cheston (Senior Advisor at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion) moderated a lively discussion with my co-panelists Wendy Abt (Deputy Assistant Administrator, USAID), David Roodman (Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development), and Alexia Latortue (Deputy CEO, CGAP). Not surprisingly, the most salient exchange of the panel arose with David in the role of provocateur.
Challenging the Campaign, he contrasted simple but powerful messages that communicate well to the mass public—“microcredit can help people lift themselves out of poverty”—to more nuanced messages that better communicate reality but are harder to condense into a soundbite. Many of us are trying to figure out how to convey the nuanced message that “a range of financial services, when combined with other important development services, may provide tools that people can use to move away from poverty.” David asked whether, after seeing the results of unchecked growth in Andhra Pradesh, the Campaign wanted to rethink its goal-setting role.
> Posted by Susy Cheston
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 , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
The television comedy survived only a few months in the sixties, but it had a catchy theme song: “It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the strangest place.” In the show, a couple of astronauts travelled at the speed of light and accidentally went back in time instead of space. Talk about disruptive technology! The two men ended up in prehistoric times trying to make sense of life with a cave community, with predictably inane results.
The theme song came to me as I was thinking about the ways both technology and new approaches to product design are blurring the lines between time and space. It’s a neat concept to say that financial services move resources across time (credit and savings) or across space (payments). But just as those astronauts thought they were traveling in space and ended up traveling in time, technology is disrupting financial services, stripping financial services down to their basic elements and allowing those elements to be re-combined in new ways. The quartet of products we can rattle off in our sleep—credit, savings, insurance, payments—no longer have sharp boundaries as technology gives us new ways to store value and as financial services enter new markets. Susan Johnson’s recent research in Kenya showed that we sometimes don’t even know what we’re talking about when we use the words savings and payments. In Kenya, a so-called savings account turned out to serve as merely a payment device for payroll transfers. And she points out the ways experts are grappling with language as financial services encounter mobile phones, e.g. “savings” defined as “keeping money in the phone for at least 24 hours.” (Hey, I can save lots of money by that definition!) Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Center Staff
We are excited to welcome Susy Cheston as Senior Advisor at the Center for Financial Inclusion, where she will develop, oversee, and contribute directly to the Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign.
She previously served as Senior Director for Water, Sanitation & Hygiene; Agriculture; and Economic Development for World Vision. In that position she oversaw a team providing technical assistance, program management, and new business development for WASH, agriculture, economic development, shelter, and climate change.
From 1992 through 2010, Susy served in various positions within Opportunity International, most recently as Senior Vice President for Policy. Susy lived in Costa Rica and El Salvador in the early 1990s, where she launched the pilot project of Opportunity’s Women’s Opportunity Fund. Her work in refining a group lending model now called Trust Groups in El Salvador led to Opportunity’s adoption of Trust Groups as its primary lending methodology. That model is now serving over a million clients worldwide. Susy also served as Senior Vice President for Policy & Research for the Opportunity International Network, focusing on client impact assessment, gender issues, integration of AIDS programs, environmental linkages, and other ways to increase impact, outreach, and financial sustainability. Read the rest of this entry »
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