Week of June 20, 2011

Part 1 of Timothy Ogden’s extended interview with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo is now up
An overview of current state of mobile phone use & services in East Africa
Monetary Theory and Mobile Banking - Lessons from Kenya
The MLK project on “Is there a business case for microinsurance?”
Richard Thaler on smarter public policy in new McKQuarterly
Reaching the Poor and Very Poor with Appropriate Savings Services
The problem of WIZZIT vs. the success of M-PESA in serving the BOP
New info re: low-income client financial behavior. Very useful for mobile money productdesign
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau likely to be driven by Warren's tenets
Jonathan Morduch's recent Science article in its entirety and unedited: “Why Finance Matters,” a commentary on Karlan & Zinman Philippines microfinance study also published in Science (gated)
Ignacio Mas contrasts 2 e-payment Success Stories: PayPal and M-PESA
"The Microfinance Contagion Scenario" by Timothy Ogden and David Roodman’s response and disagreement with the piece

July 1, 2026

Editors’ Note: Hi, Laura and Jonathan here. A few of the pieces this week come from people who spent years up close with how poor households actually handle money, and keep coming back with something more tangled than the story usually told, and more persistent. Tim will be back for the next edition. - Laura Freschi and Jonathan Morduch

June 26, 2026

Laura Freschi and Timothy Ogden

Financial inclusion’s efficiency is now exposure: Four notes from the faiVLive webinar on emerging AI cyberthreats

The idea for this conversation was born from alarm. At the news that the US Treasury Secretary and the Chair of the Federal Reserve had called a meeting with the CEOs of the twenty largest banks in America to talk about threats to the financial system from emerging frontier AI models, Tim had questions: what about the community banks, the credit unions, and the CDFIs—the financial institutions that serve low-income communities and small businesses in America? When will they be invited to the meetings on how to defend their systems against AIs that can exploit software vulnerabilities with unprecedented ease and speed? And globally, are the regulators in middle-income and developing countries also holding meetings to discuss how they can defend against these threats? Will those meetings include anyone beyond the largest banks?

May 19, 2026

Tracy Cole

What 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.

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