Elisabeth Rhyne

Gabriel Davel Proposes Tests for Credit Bubbles

Davel helped create South Africa’s National Credit Regulator, one of the world's most capable financial consumer protection agencies. In a new Focus Note, Davel draws on a number of debt crises and distills his own experience into practical guidance.

10 Things CGAP Got Right or Wrong About Financial Access

The Center for Financial Inclusion’s project, Financial Inclusion 2020 is attempting to make predictions about the future of access to finance for the world’s low income people. So I was delighted to discover in a stack of old papers a CGAP Focus Note containing a rich set of predictions for the future of microfinance – from 2006. These predictions were contained in several sets of scenarios that examined possible futures for financial inclusion.

Practitioners and the Global Findex Data

With the release by Gallup and the World Bank of the Global Findex (Financial Inclusion Index), the path to financial inclusion has just been made a little easier to travel.

We Need to Keep Learning about Overindebtedness

We need to look more carefully at the interactions between microfinance institutions and their clients, examining how MFI practices play out in lives of clients on an everyday basis. Stuart posed two specific hypotheses: if a lender needs clients to borrow continually, it incentivizes overselling and overindebtedness, and that insistence on immediate, in-full repayment drives some clients to begin bicycling loans.