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A Study of Limitations of a Study on Limitations
A friend of mine recently forwarded me a recent publication titled The Limitations of Microcredit for Promoting Microenterprises in Bangladesh that appeared in the Jan-Mar 2012 edition of the Economic...
View ArticleMicroSave naturally experimenting in AP
Natural experiments are great for the social sciences, and has been exceedingly rare for microfinance. Then the AP crisis came along, and caused the kind of change in circumstances that make for just...
View ArticleLamia Karim Talk on “Microfinance and Its Discontents”
Who knew dissertation proposals took so long to pump out ... Will blame the lull in blogging on that, though there's been a lot going on in the background that I'd love to share "soon" on the blog. In...
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4 Stages to Digital Inclusion
The concept of financial inclusion has been around for a while, and digital approaches to furthering financial inclusion has received a lot of attention because it is a potentially relatively low cost...
View ArticleMicrofinance and Its Discontents – A Mini-Review
I finally got my hands on Lamia Karim’s Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, and it made for a great read. If you are interested in this field, you should check it out. I...
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P9: But I Only Want To Save!
Saving in a Lending-to-save Product We know that folks who have to deal with incomes that are low, irregular and uncertain have to resort adapting available financial instruments to meet their...
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US Financial Diaries
There's poverty everywhere ... We've spent a fair bit of time talking about various methods to study poverty and development in this blog, ranging from plain vanilla surveys to financial diaries, RCTs...
View ArticleD.Net’s Info-Ladies
Although most of my work is with microfinance institutions, I have the good fortune to catch up with great institutions doing quite innovative work every now and then. D.Net is one such institution,...
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Living with Glorified Correlations from “Big Data”
A little while back, we realized we were nipping at the heels of "big data" territory, arriving at near 1 terabytes of data. We being the team at Bankable Frontier Associates I work with, through a...
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Surveys Gone Bad – When “Yes” means “No”
... or, A Story of How a Coding C*Screw-Up Made Bangladesh One of the Least Tolerant Countries in the World. (Spoiler: It isn't!) What We Thought We Knew Yesterday, the Washington Post put out a story,...
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Here are 2 maps, be right back!
Yes, this blog was in a bit of a hiatus. While I put together some more original stuff (and hopefully welcome additional contributors), let me share two maps with you that are pretty cool not just...
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The resilience of paper in Kenya
Author: Ignacio Mas, Senior Fellow, Center for Emerging Markets Enterprises at the Fletcher School, Tufts University With M-PESA and the whirl of innovations that it has triggered, there is no doubt...
View ArticleM-Shwari – Unconventionally Affordable at an APR of 138%?
Mobile money is all the rage these days in inclusive finance circles, and for good reason. Mobile penetration has increased dramatically across the developing world over the previous decade, providing...
View ArticleThe Next Decade, from J-PAL@TEN
About three months ago, J-PAL had a great conference celebrating ten years of incredible work that arguably has furthered evidence-based development work more than any other institution out there. All...
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Big Banks and Small Balance Accounts – the GAFIS Report
The final GAFIS report is out. "Big banks can't serve low-income clients because small balance accounts just do not offer a sustainable business proposition" has been a truism since forever, and for...
View ArticleBehavioral Product Design meets CARD’s Savings Products
I just came across this great paper from Feb 2014, by ideas42, which describes a behavioral design project undertaken by them and Grameen Foundation to improve savings outcomes for CARD Bank of the...
View ArticlePhoning with your bank – the Equity MVNO
Fascinating developments in the Kenyan mobile banking space - Equity Bank announced last month that they would become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) sometime in July. What on earth posses a...
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The Cost of bKash (and friends)
Is being "cheap enough" a 4th Reason Behind bKash's Growth? CGAP came out with a brief last month about bKash, the dominant mobile financial services company in Bangladesh, offering three reasons...
View ArticleWhy the debates that the recent microcredit RCTs are meant to close are going...
Author: Ignacio Mas, Senior Fellow, the Council on Emerging Markets Enterprises at the Fletcher School, Tufts University We have been handed down a fresh round of evidence on the impact of microcredit...
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