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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 12, 2013
Links We Like
Mostly blogs and articles we've been perusing over the past few weeks.
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?
March 27, 2013
Worse than AP: The Damage of a Repayment Crisis in Chiapas
A month ago I wrote a post singling out the Mexican state of Chiapas as a potential site of a coming repayment crisis. No, this is not a follow-up announcing that it has begun, nor am I rooting for one to start. In my next post, I will review the options that the Mexican microfinance sector has to avoid it, and what the global microfinance community can do to help.
March 25, 2013
A Revolution at Home
From Dave Birch's review of Banking the World at The Enlightened Economist: