Blog

Cash Transfers and Mobile Money: Making it Work

There are many reasons to be excited about mobile phones as a way to distribute cash transfers, such as government payments or NGO cash-for-work programs.

Is Responsible Finance in Your DNA?

Responsible finance is a way of doing business – a never-ending process of adapting your products, processes and policies to keep your clients at the center.

Partnering with Private Sector on Branchless Banking

Working with commercial actors with multi-million dollar balance sheets is incredibly rewarding and can be very different from interactions with traditional MFIs.

Branchless Banking Headlines & Highlights: Updates from Africa and Beyond

Summer is now officially over here in Washington and the busy fall season is off to a quick start. If you are just getting back into high gear, maybe this is a good time for us to recap some of the things we’ve been discussing on the blog over the last couple months, some of the latest news that’s caught our attention, and some things to keep your eye on in the coming weeks.

Microfinance Should Have Started with Savings

Much of the world is in trouble today because of debt, too much borrowing, presumably not enough saving, by individuals, companies, countries and groups of countries.

Public Funders in Branchless Banking

Public funders have been instrumental in promoting and developing the microfinance industry; close to 70% of cross border public funding going into microfinance comes from public sources. Currently, the financial inclusion world is abuzz with excitement about branchless banking and the potential of services like M-PESA in Kenya to dramatically reduce costs and increase access to financial services. Yet branchless banking is a new delivery channel mainly implemented by private stakeholders such as for-profit mobile network operators or commercial banks.

Responsible Finance: The “New Normal”?

We should expect the great majority of microfinance providers, funders and others that are double bottom line institutions to be able to measure the extent to which they’re benefiting their clients and to use this information to improve services.

Why Can’t We Answer the Question: Does Aid Work?

Whether you find it extraordinary or trivial, we still cannot answer the simple question of whether aid works or not.

Innovation in Branchless Banking at the Bangladesh Post Office

On a recent visit to Bangladesh Sarah Rotman and I met with Post Office Director General, Mobasherur Rahman, at his office in the middle of busy downtown Dhaka to hear about his foray into the world of branchless banking.

Why Poor People Don’t Use Savings Accounts

Recently a colleague shared results of the follow-on (forthcoming) study that Dupas and Robinson did on their landmark 2009 RCT study on savings in Western Kenya.

Voices from the Poverty Trap

Qualitative research gives us deep insight into how the participants of the Graduation program experienced change.

The Faces of Graduation

The essence of the qualitative research series are the participants themselves. Get to know the faces of graduation. Read their words, and become acquainted with their stories.

Can SmartAid Improve Accountability within Funders?

Interesting lessons came out of the recent CGAP Aid Effectiveness conference where the SmartAid Index for Microfinance was featured.

Rural Finance: Let’s Crack the Nut!

Rural areas, marked by dispersed populations and limited infrastructure, pose enormous challenges to financial service providers trying to reach different segments of the rural population, and it remains an underserved market.

Mobile Money Moving Rapidly Ahead in Haiti

Despite the difficulties in Haiti during 2010 and into 2011 (earthquake, infrastructure destruction, elections and political unrest, cholera epidemic, tropical storms, floods, and gas shortages), the response to HMMI by the mobile operators, technology providers, financial institutions, institutional users, and Haitians has been very positive, with both Tcho Tcho Mobile and Ti-Cash launched before the end of 2010.

Making Microfinance Prices More Transparent

The problem of keeping your price transparent is obvious — it’s difficult to show a true price that looks higher than the competition when, in fact, it is lower than that charged by others.

Will Brazil’s Banks Share Agents?

In a country where agents have existed for close to 10 years nationwide, we would expect that by now banks would have found business reasons to share agents. From a consumer perspective, it is clearly attractive to be able to access banking services for multiple providers at a single agent.

Aid Effectiveness: Being Clear about Objectives

At the heart of this disagreement is not a dispute about the impact of aid but about what we mean when we ask whether ‘aid works.’

Can Mobile Money Support Post-Conflict Development?

There's been a great deal of excitement over the last few years regarding the potential for mobile money to solve a host of development problems. An increasing number of post-conflict countries are all experimenting with or thinking about mobile money implementations. In addition to the normal issues and challenges facing policymakers and service providers, post-conflict and post-disaster countries face additional problems that merely serve to exacerbate the overall challenges with mobile money.

India Microfinance Bill Offers a Mixed Bag to Investors

The change in the thinking of the government in terms of introducing the comprehensive microfinance bill to replace the old one and emphasizing the supremacy of the regulator, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is a consequence of the events in Andhra Pradesh where the State Government has introduced a State level Act to regulate MFIs.