Week of September 23, 2011

Here's a snapshot of what captured our attention this week:

Bill Easterly: One of the nicest aid grumps you'd ever want to meet
Princeton Goes Open Access to Stop Staff from Handing All Copyright to Journals
Do you read the FAI blog or visit our site? If so, we need you! Please take 2 minutes (really, that's all it takes) to take our website survey. Your input will ensure that we buid a user-friendly website.
Dave Algoso and the Smart Aid Initiative did their own survey on user habits re: aid and development blogs. Their results are here.
10 Things We’ve Learned: #2 – Neither grants nor markets alone will solve the problems of poverty
Global Dashboard on "What's really happening to inequality?"
Timothy Ogden on "Revisiting Objections to RCTs" which inspired David Roodman's own contribution on the topic.
Wikileaks: corruption alleged in Bangaldesh prime minister's office
Dean Karlan wonders "What Percentage of Microfinance Loans Actually Go to Business Investment?"
The Hindu newspaper on a new technological innovation: A slate for micro-finance
Owen Barder contemplates the future of development cooperation and the creation of "posses" to tackle particular problems.

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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