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Displaying all posts under the topic of Impact Evaluation
May 31, 2013
New & Noteworthy
This week’s mostly new and definitely notable list includes a new report on health insurance in Ghana, investigations into calculating global poverty figures, and new thoughts on financial inclusion.
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.
A regular theme in our writing is about the need for the microfinance industry to learn from and adapt to the needs of poor households. A few weeks ago, a new paper appeared based on an interesting attempt to test whether MFIs are interested in generating and using rigorous evidence.
March 25, 2013
A Revolution at Home
From Dave Birch's review of Banking the World at The Enlightened Economist:
February 5, 2013
What’s next for KGFS?
What’s next in financial access in 2013? Bindu Ananth and Deepti George say a focus on measuring and improving quality.
January 25, 2013
A Call for Rigorous Data and Standardized Measures
Last November, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Office of Financial Empowerment hosted a conference on “Empowering Low-Income and Economically Vulnerable Consumers: Making the Case through Access, Data and Scale.” A key highlight of the conference was a breakout session about the incentives and obstacles to collecting data in the field.
In microfinance circles, people tend to be fond of asking the question, “Does microfinance work?” Over the last decade, countless studies have attempted to answer this question by studying the net impact of microcredit on the lives of borrowers. Yet, these impact studies don’t necessarily tell us much about the nuances of how organization-level factors might influence the final impact of microcredit.
October 4, 2012
Fingerprinting Microcredit Borrowers Gets the Spotlight
A very interesting microfinance experiment is in the new issue of the American Economic Review, one of the premier journals in the field (Published, but gated, version here. Ungated version here).
October 2, 2012
Highlights of David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog
David Roodman’s conversation with Jonathan Morduch is coming up tomorrow. If you haven’t read David’s book yet, you should. But we can be realists. You probably don’t have time to buy and read the whole book in the next 36 hours. So, here’s a quick cheat sheet of some highlights from David’s blog over the past few years. Reading these posts will get you up to speed (but you should still read the book!).