Small business owners overwhelmingly cite cost as the main barrier to improving job quality, but when we asked workers what they valued most, many of their top answers cost relatively little. That gap between owner perception and worker priorities is one of the most actionable findings from the final evaluation of Shared Success, an initiative by the Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program (with support from the Gates Foundation) that worked with 11 Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) to embed job quality programming into their existing small business support.
Read MoreJonathan Morduch at ABCDE 2026: Facts About Job Dynamics
Next month, FAI's Executive Director Jonathan Morduch will join the World Bank's Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) in Washington, D.C., for a session on labor market dynamics in low- and middle-income countries—questions FAI has been working on through the Small Firm Diaries and earlier household research.
Read MoreWhat it Takes to Improve Small Business Job Quality: Midterm Findings from Shared Success
Small businesses in the US employ nearly two-thirds of workers earning low wages, making them central to both economic mobility and the quality of work itself. Shared Success, launched by Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program with support from the Gates Foundation, is built on the premise that job quality is fundamental to economic resilience, particularly in historically underserved communities. The project worked with 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to embed job quality support into their programming.
Read MoreRegister Now: Emerging Cyberthreats to Global Financial Inclusion
Increasingly powerful AI tools are enabling malicious actors to target financial services systems and institutions the world over. Recently the IMF found cyber-enabled fraud has nearly tripled with losses falling hardest on developing countries. And that was before a new generation of AI models powerful enough to spur an emergency meeting between the US Federal Reserve and the CEOs of the largest banks in the world. These emerging threats are in no way confined to large multinational banks however. AI lowers the costs of cyberattacks, increasing the number of organizations at risk including CDFIs in the US, MFIs around the world, mobile money systems and fintechs focused on lower-income customers.
Read MoreStability Entrepreneurs at the 2026 Global Inclusive Growth Forum
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.
Upcoming Event: International Development: Which way now?
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 MoreEarly Findings from the Road: What we’re seeing so far in the SFD USA data
Over 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 MoreRegister Now: Small Firm Diaries USA Early Findings
Join us for an inside look into our early findings and discussion on what they may mean for policy, practice, and efforts to better support small firms and workers.
Read MoreWhat’s at Stake Now for Small Business
On 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 MoreNew Publication Alert: Big Challenges for Small Firms
Drawing 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 MoreIdeas for India: India’s poverty rate does not measure what you think it does
Like 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 in the News: The New Barometer of Americans' Financial Health? $75,000
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 In the News: Microfinance: Evolution at the crossroads of high tech and high touch
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.
Introducing a New Study on Platform Labor in India
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 MoreThe Microfinance Promise: Developing Worlds Interview Part 5
In 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 MoreMicrofinance Methodologies: Developing Worlds Interview Part 4
Morduch 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 MoreMicro-financing Women’s Empowerment and Rural Development: Developing Worlds Interview Part 3
Morduch 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 MoreBuzzwords in Microfinance: Developing Worlds Interview Part 2
Microfinance 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 MoreThe Evolution of Microfinance: Developing Worlds Interview Part 1
In 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 MoreWATCH: Plunging Into the Digital Economy, but Still Tied to Cash
In 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.
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