Week of May 11, 2015

1. Ultra-Poor: A RCT involving more than 10,000 households in six countries reports improvements in livelihoods for participants in a "graduation model" poverty intervention. While the programs didn't show effects in all contexts, cost-benefit analysis suggests promising returns on investment. Nature and Science

2. Savings: When participants in a study in India received compensation directly to a personal account, they reported higher rates of savings and consumption (regardless of gender) than peers receiving cash. However, when account holders were switched to cash payments, savings and consumption activity reverted to their original patterns. VoxEU

3. Social Networks: A new working paper from Angelucci et al. uses data from the Progresa evaluations to assess the degree to which family and social networks insure each other and provide funding for investment. They find that for every dollar received from Progresa, by a member of the network, food expenditures rise by .60 to .70 cents and investments in children also rise. J-PAL

4. Financial Inclusion: FAI affiliates David Roodman and Daniel Rozas question whether the newest Global Findex data is overstating growth in the rate of financial inclusion and what this means for policy-makers. NextBillion

5. Household Money Management: "The central conflict of domestic life right now isn't men versus women or mothers versus fathers; it's the family against money." The Atlantic

July 1, 2026

Financial Access Initiative

The Same As It Ever Was Edition

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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