1. Financial Inclusion: Dean Karlan asks: If microcredit has reached maturity, what's next for the financial inclusion movement? SSIR
2. Impact Evaluations: It may take a long time, a really long time, to see the impact of development interventions. The World Bank - African Can End Poverty
3. Housing: As much as 70 percent of the world’s population uses “incremental building,” a process of slowly improving shelter by adding components of a house. A new report looks at how to better serve these customers with housing-related financial products. SEEP Network
4. Wealth Inequality: The gender wage gap seems to be closing but the gap in wealthbetween men and women in the U.S. is a completely different story. Stanford Knowledgebase
5. Microfinance: Carmen Velasco, founder of Pro Mujer, shares her thoughts on the future of microfinance and how much profit is too much for MFIs. NextBillion
The image above is taken from Five Talents' recent photo essay on savings groups in Burundi.
Photo credit: Ross Oscar Knight for Five Talents
Editor’s Note: I’m going to assume that you are seeing plenty of AI content (news and papers, not AI slop, though I’m sure you’re getting plenty of that too) from other sources, so I’m trying to think hard about the marginal value that the faiV can provide. As far as I’ve gotten so far: a) make sure that directly AI-related content does not take up more than 2 of the 5 items, and b) try to focus specifically on the cybersecurity issue for financial inclusion. Beyond that, I’m open to feedback on the value you get from the faiV in relation to AI to help guide us in the future. On a different note, I’ll be making a brief cameo appearance at the e-MFP Inclusive Finance Conference to moderate the opening plenary. If you haven’t registered, do so and I hope to see you there! - Tim Ogden