Part of our mission at FAI is to frame policy and regulatory issues by synthesizing evidence from existing research and generating new evidence where it's lacking.
Tim Ogden, FAI Managing Director and Project Director for the Small Firm Diaries, spoke last week at Mastercard’s 2026 Global Inclusive Growth Forum. Invited to share insights into how small firms are weathering challenging and volatile times, he drew on global Small Firm Diaries findings and preliminary data from the study in the US to highlight both aspirations and pain points.
This video was recorded live on April 15, 2026.
FAI Executive Director Jonathan Morduch will moderate a panel on the future of international development at the 2026 NYU DRI Annual Conference on Monday, April 20 at 4pm ET.
The international development sector is in crisis, with aid budgets, donor priorities, and delivery models all being torn up and reconsidered. Crises can also be moments of honest reckoning—openings to ask how we got here, economically and politically, and what should come next for development policy and practice. FAI's work on poverty and inclusive finance runs through a lot of these questions.
Read MoreOver the past few weeks, the Small Firm Diaries research team has been visiting US cities to share what we're seeing in the data so far—stopping in St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, and New York, with Oakland still ahead on May 26. These conversations have been useful in both directions: hearing where our findings on growth, credit use, and jobs resonate with local audiences, and hearing the questions and pushback that have helped us sharpen our thinking.
A caveat worth stating upfront: we're roughly halfway through the research, with data still being gathered, cleaned, and analyzed. Specific numbers may change. With that in mind, here's some of what we've been discussing.
Read MoreOn November 19, 2025, FAI hosted a faiVLive webinar to introduce the Small Firm Diaries USA study. We shared early observations, and talked with expert panelists about how recent policy and program changes are affecting small businesses and organizations that support them. In this blog we’ve adapted and edited a few of the most interesting discussion points from our conversation. You can still watch the full webinar, here.
Read MoreDrawing on high-frequency data from small firms, the brief documents how volatility shapes day-to-day decision-making. Week-to-week fluctuations in revenue and liquidity influence choices on hiring, investment, and risk in ways that are often invisible in standard datasets.
Read MoreLike all national poverty rates, India’s poverty rate is interpreted as the share of the population that is poor in a given year. In this post written for Ideas for India, Joshua Merfeld and Jonathan Morduch argue that, in practice, India’s poverty rate is better thought of as the approximate fraction of the year that households experience poverty. They describe how this is rooted in the nature of data collection, and how it changes understandings of poverty and policy in the country.
FAI’s Managing Director Tim Ogden was cited in an article in Next Avenue by Richard Eisenberg about a new study of 5,000 Americans with household incomes of less than $75,000 per year. This study was carried out by Assurance IQ, a a Prudential Financial subsidiary, and was inspired in part by the US Financial Diaries, led by FAI along with the Center for Financial Services Innovation.
The new study found that 57% of respondents aged 50 and older with incomes under $75,000 struggled to pay bills last year; that 38% couldn’t afford their health insurance deductibles; and that 31% avoided medical care due to cost. If faced with a future unexpected medical expense, 28% said they wouldn't be able to cover it without affecting their ability to pay monthly bills.
The financial volatility experienced by these households—also a main finding of the USFD study—prevents families from planning and saving for financial goals that are (or seem) far in the future.
Ogden said he wasn't surprised by Assurance IQ's findings because incomes are often highly volatile for these households. Many are either hourly workers with varying hours or in jobs that aren't steady.
"Most of what we talk about in financial planning and budgeting starts from the assumption that you know how much money you have and how much you're going to earn. But if you don't know that, how do you create a budget?" Ogden said.
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As Ogden noted, when income is volatile, trying to plan for future expenses, like retirement costs, "is really difficult when you're worried about how much I need to save up for the six-month car insurance payment."
Online financial planning questionnaires, he said, typically assume you know your future income and spending needs.
Access the Next Avenue article (published April 4, 2024) and read the Assurance IQ study report.
FAI’s Managing Director Tim Ogden was cited in an article in Philanthropy News Digest about the successes and failures of the microfinance movement, and how technology is changing the future of microlending. Ogden discussed the ongoing need for subsidy in microfinance, how to factor in the true costs of digitization, and the risk that high-tech approaches exclude the poorest and hardest-to-reach populations.
"The great success of microfinance,” said Ogden, “has been in radically increasing the number of people who have control of their own decisions because they now have access to some financial tools that enable them to choose to save, to borrow, to insure themselves, to send money, all at their choosing, rather than somebody else's. For microfinance to thrive, it needs to find a mechanism that allows for continuous subsidy and a new narrative that is more honest about the actual cost of each small investment.”
Read the entire article, by Daniel X Matz, here.
One frame on FAI’s research agenda is understanding the role of employment in development. How does employment help people escape from poverty? What kinds of jobs—for instance formal employment, self-employment, casual labor— are best for improving people’s wellbeing, economic and otherwise? What are the characteristics of a “good” job?
Read MoreIn this concluding excerpt, Morduch and Labie discuss the continuing relevance of microfinance, and re-assess an influential paper authored by Morduch in 1999 called “The Microfinance Promise.” While much has changed since the paper came out, Morduch says he’d keep the title— “The sector can count incredible successes, but the biggest economic and social ambitions remain as promises.”
Read MoreMorduch and Labie discuss trends in thinking around how microfinance has been delivered and funded over the past decades, including group lending, subsidies for microfinance, the tension between the need for discipline and flexibility, and how advances in technology are shaping the field.
Read MoreMorduch and Labie take a look back at two of the original goals of the microfinance movement—empowering women, and bolstering rural development—and discuss the evidence on how well interventions have achieved those aims.
Read MoreMicrofinance is a rich text for students of rhetoric. In practice, each shift in wording has brought a shift away from concerns with poverty and social justice toward finance for less poor populations.
Read MoreIn a recent interview for the journal Mondes en Développement Jonathan Morduch looked back at what we’ve learned about microfinance and financial inclusion in the past decades, and shares how he thinks those lessons can shape future policies to help poor families better manage their money.
Read MoreIn this video we created for Financial Inclusion Week, we sift through data to tell the story of businesses straddling the borderlands between the cash and digital economies after COVID-19.
Read MoreFAI’s webinar on the Financial and Literacy Gap was cited in an article published by Yahoo Money on September 11, 2022. The article by Kerry Hannon explored the reasons for a steady decline in financial and digital literacy in the United States over the last 12 years, and spoke to experts about measures to counter the decline.
Read MoreIf MFIs fail to digitalize, it could mean the end of financial services for the rural poor, because the business case is so challenging, particularly compared to the diverse, low-cost opportunities to serve the higher-value, connected urban market. In short, this could end years of progress towards financial and social inclusion.
Read MoreWelcome to this month’s faiVLive webinar. Watch the recording on our YouTube channel here.
There’s no question that there are big gaps in financial literacy between the rich and poor, and between those included and excluded at every income level and in every country. As digital finance becomes more important, the gap grows and takes on added dimensions. No wonder that financial (and now digital) literacy programs attract attention and millions of dollars globally.
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