Can the poorest be reached with finance? "Ultra poor" members of society face a series of constraints and deprivations that distinguish them from the general poor. Limited social networks, chronic malnutrition, and reliance on patronage systems characterize a socioeconomic class that is hard to "bank."
Read MoreWhat is microcredit?
Billions of poor households around the world lack access to basic financial services. New ideas about banks can translate into workable financial institutions that serve the poor around the world . . .
Read MoreEvent recap: Microfinance impact studies – necessary but not sufficient?
For those of you who couldn’t attend Wednesday’s event, “Microfinance's Social Impact: Cutting through the Hype,” sponsored by the Microfinance Club of New York and hosted by FAI, here’s a recap.
The panel featured FAI’s Jonathan Morduch, David Roodman, a senior fellow at theCenter for Global Development, Chris Dunford, President of Freedom from Hunger, and Jody Rasch from Moody’s Investors Service.
We were happy that the moderator started the event by making the important distinction between social performance measurement and impact evaluation. Social performance measurement seeks to answer the questions of how MFI clients are doing, and how MFIs can help serve those clients better. Social impact evaluation, which is the focus of much of FAI’s research, tries to answer the question of what would have happened to people in the absence of microfinance. . .
Read MoreSavings without interest and free loans? More innovations from SafeSave
n a previous post, I wrote about my visit to SafeSave in Dhaka. SafeSave also has a cousin organization, called Shohoz Shonchoy (“Easy Savings,” in Bangla), that operates in rural Bangladesh. Shohoz Shonchoy employs the same flexible methodology as SafeSave, with collectors visiting clients every day to allow clients to make financial transactions from their homes or workplaces. Shohoz Shonchoy has been providing a fascinating product since 2007. Product 9 (P9) incorporates many new insights into poor people’s ways of managing their financial lives, and makes it easy for them to save . . .
Read MoreReport from the field: SafeSave, a different kind of microfinance methodology
Last week I had the pleasure to visit SafeSave, an unconventional microfinance institution operating in Dhaka, Bangladesh. SafeSave was founded by Stuart Rutherford (among other things, author of The Poor and Their Money and co-author ofPortfolios of the Poor) and puts a very interesting twist on the traditional model of credit-led microfinance institutions. (To see Stuart Rutherford discussing SafeSave, seeVideo IV, at the 5:30 mark.)
SafeSave provides financial services to very poor clients without relying on group meetings, joint liability, guarantors, or even fixed weekly loan repayments. It was set up as an experiment, to learn whether a flexible, non-group lending methodology would be sustainable. In practice, a lot of the common microfinance wisdom is challenged, and it works: the repayment rate, for example, stands at 95 percent. This is just one statistic. More importantly, I think SafeSave’s methodology is a great way of serving clients with a flexible and convenient system that matches their needs in a unique way.
At the heart of SafeSave’s methodology are the 66 collectors, who visit clients at their homes or workplaces every day and provide them with an opportunity to make savings deposits or withdrawals, and repay their loans (clients need to go to the branch for loan disbursement and large savings withdrawals). All collectors are women who come from the same neighborhoods that SafeSave serves. To match clients’ irregular income flows, savings and loan repayments are optional, and clients choose how much they want to save or repay on a given day. Loans therefore do not have a definite term . . .
Read MoreMore on problem solving systems
As a quick follow-up to Meredith's post, I wanted to add a few additional thoughts.
Meredith mentioned that "at IPA, we always strive to conduct research in a way that identifies not just whether an isolated solution works, but why it works, so that we gain information about what was causing the problem in the first place.' The majority of IPA's projects involve randomized evaluations in the developing world, and we have been able to replicate similar evaluations in various contexts in order to understand the local factors that play a role in a program's impact. While individual randomized evaluations may be criticized for their external validity, the replication approach helps to address that concern. Ultimately, numerous points of light shine through and we begin to develop a holistic perspective on things.
Which is not to say that randomized evaluations are the only way to go about things; but they play an integral part in the development of functional problem-solving systems. This is something that top-down development advocates would do well to take note of. For instance, development theorists are constantly on the lookout for the "right" institutions. As Banerjee (2008) observes, the institutionalist literature is still unclear as to what sort of institutions need to be encouraged, with few reliable policy prescriptions having emerged. If you subscribe to the thinking of seminal institutionalist thinker Douglass North, institutional change is overwhelmingly an incremental one. Alternatively, you could subscribe to the original Shock Doctrine that advocated inter alia rapid, wholesale change.
Although I don't quite subscribe to all the rhetoric of shock doctrine critics, I think there is enough reason to believe that institutional change should be an incremental process; after all, when we barely know what institutions truly work, how could we advocate system-wide changes?
Read MoreCustomers not interested in your financial services? New FAI paper looks at implications of take-up rates
In microfinance, the issues that get the most play tend to be the ones most closely related to bottom lines: What are the net impacts on households? How do institutions achieve sustainability? Which mechanisms work, and why? But sometimes, in our pursuit of headline results, we skip over quieter details that tell us something important. Take-up rates often fit this description. In a new FAI Framing Note by Dean Karlan, Jonathan Morduch, and Sendhil Mullainathan, we pay them some much deserved attention.
Take-up rates are the proportion of individuals from a defined population who participate in a program. They are surprisingly variable and, in some cases, surprisingly low: data from 2 surveys and 13 projects show that take-up rates of financial services range between 2 and 84 percent of eligible individuals.
By revealing valuable information about customers’ interest in a particular product or service, take-up rates give us a way to quantify demand. Low take-up rates also can suggest pent-up demand for products that are differently designed or priced. In addition, take-up rates have a technical implication for impact evaluations: when they are very low, researchers need data from a much larger sample to get results they can be confident in.
In a way, take-up rates are always a bridesmaid and never the bride . . .
Read MoreLooking for the antibiotics of development
A few days ago, Bill Easterly argued on Aidwatch that development comes not from solutions, but from functional problem-solving systems that motivate and facilitate solutions. In many ways, this is an argument for bottom-up, decentralized development, where people with local knowledge and first-hand experience of outcomes are the ones who determine what needs to be done.
On a deep level, Easterly is right, and not just because identifying the right solutions requires local knowledge. It’s also about sustainability, in a literal sense. In order for actual development to occur, solutions have to be imbedded in a local system that drives and sustains them without constant flows of money from NGOs or donor governments. Otherwise, it’s not development, but rather a permanent system of redistribution from wealthy countries to poor ones. It’s like claiming to cure an ill person by keeping her on life support. A person who is on dialysis and pain medication is alive and comfortable – and that is almost certainly better than the alternative. But, real healing would imply that we have figured out what’s wrong with the liver and fixed it, so that the body’s system is doing its own miraculous thing without mechanical intervention. Forcibly simulating the outcomes of good system can temporarily get you better health and education and housing, but it only goes so far . . .
Read MoreRole of consumer education and technology in microinsurance
When CARE India field officers delivered emergency relief services to the coastal regions ravaged by the 2004 tsunami, they were struck by the communities’ vulnerability to shocks and lack of access to appropriate risk protection tools, and assessed that microinsurance could be an effective product for these communities. Out of this determination, the CARE Insure Lives and Livelihoods (ILAL) microinsurance program was born. In introducing this new program, CARE set out to improve communities’ risk management capacities by improving their understanding of insurance.
A new case study from FAI takes an in-depth look at the key challenges—such as sustainability and performance measurement of the education programme—and how CARE tried to overcome them . . .
Read MoreA new FAI paper asks: So how exactly do we regulate microfinance?
That is indeed the question when regulators so often find themselves playing catch up – trying to figure out if and how something that’s already happening should be supervised. When it comes to prudential regulation – or, safeguarding deposits – the stakes are particularly high.
In microfinance, most MFIs aren’t big enough to threaten the health of the financial systems they’re part of if they run into trouble. However, if prudential regulation of microfinance is inadequate – or when it fails – poor customers stand to lose their savings entirely. And the stakes really don’t get much higher than that.
As with other forms of regulation, the basic dilemma is that regulators of microfinance want to ensure the health of financial institutions without creating undue burdens on the institutions, or on themselves. Striking the balance is tricky when experience with regulating financial access and evidence to support hypothetical costs and benefits are so thin.
In his third Policy Framing Note for FAI, David Porteous sheds some light on why these challenges are so, well, challenging, and describes early experiences with prudential regulation of microfinance in India, Nigeria, the Philippines and Nigeria.
According to the paper, there are two basic ways to integrate microfinance into regulatory frameworks. One is to amend existing regulations; the other is to write new laws that open special “windows” for microfinance. The window approach is appealing, since microfinance is a rather unique animal in the world of financial services . . .
Read MoreJob creation and economic growth: The trouble with micro?
The premise of microfinance is that very small loans can make a big difference. The argument is that getting capital to cash-starved “micro-entrepreneurs” will go farther than getting capital to cash-starved small business owners. The premise is plausible, but the opposite is also plausible. Rather than going micro, bigger businesses may be able to generate better jobs and do so more efficiently. Those bigger businesses may be able to generate bigger impacts directly via job creation and indirectly through regional economic growth.
Sometimes bigger might be better. The problem is we don’t have much good evidence to go by.
That’s going to change. We’re already getting cautionary evidence on micro-enterprises. The big randomized control trials of the past year yield tepid conclusions – which is helping to open the door to thinking about interventions to support bigger businesses. In India, for example, a JPAL/IPA/FAI study finds that business owners who received microcredit did not report having more employees 12 to 18 months after receiving their loans. Karlan and Zinman (2010) take a look at microcredit in the Philippines. They find a surprising decline in the number of paid helpers in Filipino businesses that received a microcredit loan. The studies are described here . . .
Read MoreNew Grameen Foundation survey: Learning to love impact evaluations?
In 2009, the results from the first randomized control trials in microfinance were released – and they’ve been stirring up controversy ever since. The studies’ failure to find a strong causal link between financial access for the poor and poverty reduction spawned a particularly heated debate between microfinance practitioners and advocates versus researchers.
While all of the parties share the same goal of improving lives, team advocate has shown reluctance to embrace the results, continuing to point to anecdotal evidence (in joint written statements no less), while team research has stuck to its guns, emphasizing the potentially positive outcome of these trials – i.e., the opportunity to understand how to better serve poor clients . . .
Read MoreEducating clients about microinsurance: More complicated than you might think
Most players in the microinsurance sector would agree that to increase the outreach of microinsurance products, more education is needed. But, this is where the agreement ends. Discussions around content, delivery, funding and measurement of insurance education raise more questions than answers. What is insurance education, and how should we define it? How is it different from product marketing? What are the most effective delivery channels? Who should pay for education? How do we measure its impact?
Read MoreVirtual Conference Day Two: Designing financial services, interest rates and market research, part 3
Key Principles of Designing Financial Services
• Daryl Collins posed the question of whether product design for the poor needs to undergo a complete and utter re-think, or whether tinkering around the edges is sufficient.
• The conversation about how to formalize some of the informal mechanisms (such as savings groups) that seem to be working for poor families continued. While Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) and Savings and Loans Groups (SLGs) seem to be a sort of “savings club plus” with enhanced reliability (in theory), Daryl wondered whether there was evidence that they actually do enhance reliability in practice.
• Daryl followed up on the VSLA and SLG conversation and noted that they were largely absent in any of the three diary countries. Based on her observations and familiarity with other research, she suspected that there would be take up despite the existence of other centrally offered services. Daryl wondered whether people save more in VSLAs than in other more traditional types of financial devices, like a bank account. Citing research from the South African diaries, Daryl reported that respondents saved much more of their monthly income in savings groups than banks, despite holding accounts in both types of accounts. She wondered how these patterns shift when a new type of channel, such as m-banking is introduced into the picture.
• Jonathan Morduch offered his comments on the VSLA discussion and commended Daryl for her question about what happens when people have the choice to save/borrow in VSLAs versus in traditional banks. Jonathan cited observations from Tanzania where the population using VSLAs is distinct from the “banked” population. In Tanzania, the VSLA-users Jonathan saw were also in ROSCAs. This portfolio allowed for greater flexibility and is in accord with other parts of East Africa where it is common for people to be in several ROSCAs simultaneously. Jonathan cited a surprising element in a two-year VSLA in Tanzania where the dividend was divided based on cumulative savings, without regard for whether the savings were deposited in the first month or the 24th. While this arrangement made things simpler for the group, it seemed problematic for economists who weigh the “time value of money” heavily.
Read MoreVirtual Conference Day Two: Designing financial services, interest rates and market research, part 2
Key Principles of Designing Financial Services
• It was pointed out that reliability is important for clients from the point of view of security as well as assurance that their requirements would be met
• Sandeep and Jitendra noted that convenience is becoming a major differentiator in competitive markets and that door step services are highly valued by clients. Peter also highlighted the importance of convenience by speaking about the importance of proximity and local participation.
• Ashish Bazaari of BGFL mentioned that in the context of individual lending the product features like amount of loan, repayment terms and frequency and tenure of the loan need to be flexible to suit client requirements
• It was observed that imparting flexibility should take into consideration the viability of doing so given the costs involved. Information Technology was mentioned as one enabler which could potentially impart flexibility to products while minimising the costs.
• It was noted that structure is especially important when clients are saving with a specific purpose and a suggestion was made to develop structured products suited to client cash flow.
• There was an opinion that structure and flexibility are not complementary and that attempting to balance both in the same product might be counterproductive. The response from the forum cited the Jijenge account at Equity Bank as an example and countered that it was indeed possible to balance these seemingly contrasting principles.
• Clemence Tatin Jaleran of CIRM mentioned that the key principles remain the same even for microinsurance, though the specific regional context would also have to be studied to arrive at an ideal balance of these key principles. Premasis built upon the need for flexibility in microinsurance and mentioned that client flexibility requirements need to be studied during product development. He mentioned savings-linked insurance and stressed the need for product positioning to be clear in the minds of the customer . . .
Read MoreVirtual Conference Day Two: Designing financial services, interest rates and market research, part 1
Key Principles of Designing Financial Services
• Portfolios of the Poor suggests that the four key principles to designing financial services are reliability, convenience, flexibility and structure; the importance of each of these was discussed by Stuart Rutherford. Reliability refers to attributes which make the service on time, transparent and dependable. Convenience refers to characteristics that increase the usability of the service. Flexibility is the ability of the service to accommodate the changing needs of the poor. Structure refers to features which set up a routine and nudge the client to stick to it.
• Krishna stressed that reliability for a client in the service comes primarily from being able to trust the service provider to deliver on what it promises. Stuart agreed with Krishna that trust indeed was the key and it is essentially generated by repeatedly keeping to promises. Anup Singh quoted from his experience in the Philippines and pointed out that many a time physical appearance of the institution and other physical evidence which promotes transparency is a key factor in building trust. Madhavi discussed this in terms of client concerns about safety and security of savings.
• Anup equated convenience with the ease of performing transactions. For him, another aspect that contributed to convenience, especially in case of savings products, was liquidity.
• Larry Reed wondered what an ideal balance of structure and flexibility would look like. Stuart suggested that one way of getting this right was by offering separate products. It may also be balanced in the same product as done in the p9 trials in Bangladesh. Another way to do this might be the SafeSave model where a visit from the deposit collector creates a frequent opportunity rather than a regular obligation to pay.
• Ursula pointed out the cost aspect in deciding on the pricing and the product design and mentioned a need to manage flexibility with cost effectiveness so as to be competitive. Another aspect highlighted was the need to match flexibility of savings with tenure of credit so as to ensure an effective asset liability match.
Guy Stuart contributed further thoughts on gender . . .
Read MoreVirtual Conference Day One: Innovations, financial behaviors and methodology, part 3
Innovations and financial services for the poor
David Cracknell of MicroSave wondered if there have been significant changes in how people manage their money over time, and made specific references to the impact of the Mzansi accounts in South Africa. Daryl Collins noted that Portfolios researchers revisited the original South African diary households in 2009, five years after the first financial diaries on these households, to see how they might have changed their financial behavior in light of both Mzansi and the broader Financial Sector Charter that required financial services to become physically closer to poor households. Daryl provided some of their key findings, including:
• A 22% increase in take up of new banking services – most were new accounts opened by people who already had accounts, but in rural areas, the number of unbanked adults was driven down from 42% of the sample to 21%.
• Higher saving as a percent of monthly income (i.e., the amount put aside from monthly income): about 19% of income in 2004 compared with 27% of income in 2009 (perhaps reflecting a real median increase in income per capita of 8%).
• Comparisons between 2004 and 2009 of the same sample of households showed: Much higher use of bank accounts, much higher accumulation of savings in bank accounts, and slightly higher balances held in bank accounts.
Daryl concluded that this data suggests that we must expect that often changes in financial behavior come in shifts in the financial portfolio and not a wholesale abandonment of a particular device or practice, and this is likely to happen fairly slowly over time, and directed readers to the www.finmark.org.za website for more information on the study.
Read MoreVirtual Conference Day One: Managing money, drivers of behavior and the role of MFIs, part 2
Mechanisms to Manage Money – continued
• During the course of the research, it was seen that higher dependence on informal means was seen more in urban settings than rural in spite of higher and more regular incomes due to factors like mobility of clients, lack of secure tenure etc. The challenge is to figure out how to mitigate these risks so as to ensure supply of formal financial services to these customers.
• Informal mechanisms though used widely have a risk of monetary loss associated with them and in the past experience; the losses as a percentage of savings have been significantly high.
• Chris Linder wondered about the non-financial methods the poor use to manage risk and queried as to whether there were ways in which MFIs could package non-financial risk mitigation services to the clients along with financial services. Peter cited the experience of construction savings banks in Europe and mentioned that formal financial intermediaries may indeed have a role in providing linkages between the financial and non- financial sector.
• The presence of MFIs in the geographies studied varied widely. In South Africa they were absent, in India the presence was limited and in Bangladesh they were present in most of the respondent households. Even where they were present, they were seen as one among the many options available to clients rather than as ‘The’ financial service provider.
• Some respondents mentioned Post Office savings schemes as a formal savings option available to the poor. But as evidenced by the diary households, this option was suited to relatively better off clients than the poor though the accessibility was quite good especially in rural areas. The constraint was the lack of flexibility in the product and the inability to leverage it for short-term credit requirements.
Virtual Conference Day One: Managing money, drivers of behavior and the role of MFIs, part 1
Mechanisms to Manage Money
We started off the discussion by noting that in all three countries where the research for the book was done, the households interviewed were using a mix of formal, semiformal and informal tools and both saving and borrowing so as to manage their cash flows – though there were regional differences in the amount of usage of each depending on specific characteristics of the market. Anup Singh then shared his experience from the Philippines of the poor using multiple mechanisms to manage their money and remarked that these tools are used by them for “ensuring continuity (of business and life) and for hedging risks.”
Larry Reed directed the discussion to the relative merits of formal, semi-formal and informal financial tools. The forum noted that though there were several shortcomings in informal tools, they had a lot of insights to offer the formal sector and that the formal sector could improve upon product offerings of the informal sector.
Peter van Djik queried whether borrowings and savings are considered indistinguishable by the clients . . .
Read MoreNew ways to strengthen old ways: M-PESA and informal finance
When organised financial services reach people who have for generations used informal mechanisms to manage their money, one of the most important features they bring is reliability - ensuring, for example, that loans and savings withdrawals are disbursed in full and on the promised day, or that deposits and repayments are collected and recorded accurately. It matters because informal devices and services, despite their many virtues, are not always reliable. The problem with moneylenders, most poor people will tell you, is not so much that they charge high interest rates as that you can't depend on them to give you a loan in the first place. Savings clubs of one sort or another are a boon when they work well, but they don't always work well. Storing money with a neighbour keeps it out of the greedy hands of your husband, but when you need to get it back in an emergency the neighbour may not have the cash ready at that moment. Unfortunately, this is sometimes the case with MFIs as well. Nothing irritates me more than to hear MFI staff telling their clients, "sorry, can you come back next week?" When that happens, their services are no better than those that poor people can find for themselves in the informal sector.
But it’s an oversimplification to think that organised services are better than informal ones . . .
Read More