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Displaying all posts under the Big Question of Credit
May 17, 2013
Impact Evaluation of Compartamos Released
The long-awaited impact study of Compartamos, led by Manuela Angelucci of the University of Michigan and Dean Karlan and Johnathan Zimmerman of IPA, has finally been published. The research team used a randomized trial to test the impact of loans offered at 110% APR by Compartamos, the largest microlender in Mexico.
Half of the adults in the world are “unbanked” -- about 2.5 billion people. That’s the starting point of a new book, Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion, published by the MIT Press.
It's an important moment for the microfinance movement. At a time when real progress has been made in making financial services available to the poor, questions abound about the effectiveness of microfinance as a way of helping people escape from poverty. The priveleged position microfinance has enjoyed among poverty interventions and social investment is eroding. Charting the right path forward for microfinance--and effective investments in reducing poverty--requires a closer look at how microfinance really has worked.
April 22, 2013
What is the Impact of Muhammad Yunus?
Muhammad Yunus spoke to an overflowing crowd at NYU on April 15, an event jointly sponsored by the Wagner School of Public Service, Stern School of Business, and Financial Access Initiative.
April 17, 2013
In Conversation with Economist Rohini Pande
Timothy Ogden and Economist Rohini Pande discuss how standard microcredit may undermine business investment in this FAI Video interview.
Transcript of the Conversation
April 15, 2013
Yunus, Entrepreneurs and Employees
We had the good fortune to host, with NYU-Wagner and NYU-Stern, a talk by Muhammad Yunus today at FAI. If you couldn't join us in the room or via the livestream, you can read the tweetstream from the talk by searching Twitter for #FAIYunus, and soon we'll post video of the event.
Recently FAI hosted a discussion with Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and pioneer in the field of microfinance. The event was moderated by Jonathan Morduch and co-sponsored by NYU Wagner and NYU Stern.
April 5, 2013
Measuring (and Missing) Financial Inclusion
The fastest growing part of the financial inclusion movement isn’t a product or even a standard, it’s data and measurement. And if there’s something experts are increasingly agreeing on, it’s that it is illusory to try to define financial inclusion in any precise, universal way. John Gitau says he’s confused, and so am I. How do you measure financial inclusion?
April 4, 2013
Beyond Business: Rethinking Microfinance
In just 30 years, the microfinance movement has reached 200 million people who had been deemed "unbankable." That's a stunning success. But the narrative that drove this success has implicitly shut the vast majority of the unbanked out of the system. That's why it's time to change the story, and our minds, on how microfinance works, argue FAI's Jonathan Morduch and Timothy Ogden in Foreign Policy.
March 28, 2013
Financing Seasonal Migration: A New Use for Microcredit?
In many places, agriculture is highly seasonal. That presents difficulties for subsistence farmers who have to stretch incomes year-round. If farmers (or family members) could migrate during the off-season to areas where wage labor is available, they could substantially smooth their annual income and consumption. Indeed, this is what happens in many places. But even where seasonal migration does happen, many people don't migrate even when it seems it would be advantageous to do so. Why?