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> Posted by Merene Botsio, Financial Inclusion 2020 Project Coordinator, CFI
Before I proceed, I need to warn you that this game tends to be highly addictive, especially if you have a deeply curious and solution-oriented mind.
My roommate Nomsa and I discovered 3rd World Farmer in the spring semester of our senior year at Wellesley, while doing research for our Development Economics class. What started off as a quest by two Pan-Africanist women to understand the idea behind a game that had a hodgepodge of African names turned out to be an eye-opening encounter with a relatively new concept that I have now become very familiar with – financial inclusion.
The game simulates “one of the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd world countries,” and it delivers this very realistically. As a player, you are asked to manage a rural African farm. In addition to the farmer, his wife, and two children, who are all in perfect health at the inception of the game, you are also given a hut, land, and $50 in seed capital. This isn’t a lot of money as tools and grains are expensive (a scythe costs $35, corn $12, peanuts $18, and cotton $22). A tractor, a harvester, a well, a barn, and other farming resources are all far above your means. The exorbitant cost of insurance, education, healthcare, and telecommunication facilities renders these resources inaccessible until much later in the game. Often, your family dies before you reach this point.
> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor, CFI
In a challenge to luminaries gathered at the Clinton Global Initiative, President Clinton asked the following question: in a world where nearly everything has been solved by someone somewhere, why can’t we bring more solutions to scale?
Jim Yong Kim, the new President of the World Bank, had a great answer. We need to design for scale from the start. For example, one of the biggest breakthroughs in addressing HIV/AIDS on a global level has been the success in negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to bring drug prices down. Thanks to work spearheaded by the Clinton Health Access Initiative alongside UNITAID and the U.K.’s Department for International Development, companies were persuaded to dramatically change their business model from one of low volume/high cost to high volume/low cost. The cost of life-saving medication dropped from thousands of dollars to, in some cases, $50 to $75 per person per year. The number of people with access to the medication rose from 200,000 to millions over a decade. A radical change in the business model meant the providers remained profitable while millions more have been served with treatment that not only prolongs their lives but also has an impact on prevention.
> Posted by Henry Jackelen, Jackelen Associates
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.
We’ve always known that microcredit is not a panacea.
During the heady days of the microcredit revolution in the 1980s and 90s, I was part of a veritable village of practitioners. It was a remarkable group of driven, passionate, and often iconoclastic individuals. We lived in our own Utopia, defining and inventing the concept of social enterprise. But even then we knew that our microcredit efforts weren’t perfect.
When I first visited Bangladesh in 1983, my role was to review the Grameen and BRAC programs as part of developing a new World Bank program (which proposed what became known as the Palli Karma Shayak Foundation or PKSF, a successful Apex for MFIs). Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Leora Klapper, Lead Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Research Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank
Today the World Bank, in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, unveils an important new source of information that can help advance the financial inclusion agenda. We call it the “Global Findex,” short for the Global Financial Inclusion Database, and it is the first large-scale, comparable, demand-side financial inclusion data-collection exercise of its kind. Using the Gallup World Poll survey, we measure how over 150,000 adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. We also have the ability to disaggregate by gender, age, education, and income, allowing researchers to more precisely identify the unbanked. Eager to get your hands on the data? Click here.
For those that are still with me, let me share some of our initial findings: Read the rest of this entry »
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