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Saving Up Is Hard to Do

The financial lives of the poor are dominated by the need to build usefully large sums of money for immediate expenditure.

Let’s Play: Making Savings Fun

The borlette system in Haiti is hard to ignore. Part casino, part dream parlor, part bank, the borlette network gleams on the retail landscape.

Delivering on the Savings Promise of Mobile Money

By planning payments, households can seek to stabilize their daily circumstances, develop opportunities to improve their condition in the future, and mitigate shocks that can set their families back.

The Power of Successful Market-led Savings Mobilization

Successful savings products can transform financial institutions, leading to explosive growth in numbers of clients, funds for on-lending and income.

Islamic Microfinance in Tanzania

Tanzania eco-Volunteerism’s (TeV) honey project is a community development program providing rural poor communities of Tanzania with an innovative microfinance model that is in complete compliance with Islamic guidelines for business and finance.

GCASH Supports the Philippine Government’s Programs

Globe Telecom is a leading telecommunications company in the Philippines that runs the GCASH mobile money service.

Islamic Microfinance Challenge: Profiling Tameer Bank, Pakistan

Pakistan does not have any visible Islamic microfinance banks or institutions, so this is a critical project to move forward, albeit in a staged way to limit risk and cost and making sure that we apply new learning as we go.

Microcredit Deserves Support, not Suppression

Owing to its innovative program design and practices, microcredit reaches many poor people who lack access to formal finance. This is clearly a major gain that protects the poor and other disadvantaged groups from resorting to informal loans at extortionate rates.

Why Has Islamic Microfinance Not Reached Scale Yet?

How come in a country like Bangladesh, the largest MFI or bank providing products complying with Sharia reach only 100,000 active borrowers compared to the 22 million active borrowers reached by Grameen Bank, BRAC, and ASA, all of which are providing conventional products?

Constructing an Early Warning Index

Over-indebtedness has a detrimental effect on all players involved: first and foremost for the borrower.

Two Cautionary Tales from Bangladesh

For leaders who devised Bangladeshi’s microfinance miracle in the first place, adjusting staff instructions and realigning incentives to remove these foolish practices should be a piece of cake.

Taking Islamic Microfinance to Scale

Today, microfinance and Islamic finance are professionalized industries with diverse products, growing client bases, and widening geographical coverage. Both have developed innovative solutions to cater to populations that are outside the fold of conventional financial access.

How Do Migrant Workers Move Money in India?

To better understand just how costly making remote payments can be for poor households, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the Centre for Micro Finance at the Institute for Financial and Management Research (IFMR) and the Reserve Bank of India’s College for Agricultural Banking to survey 274 domestic Indian migrants and their families living at opposite ends of four domestic remittance corridors.

Legally, How Young Is Too Young to Open a Savings Account?

In most countries, youth under the age of 18 are typically prevented from independently opening a savings account because few banks are willing to offer any financial services without requiring a signed contract.

Are Girls Better at Planning and Saving than Boys?

While there might be a selection bias in terms of fewer boys in the universe actually saving, there is also a perception that boys are not adept at managing their money.

Postal Savings Banks Reinvigorated by Increased Competition

Postal banks in South Africa and Kenya are celebrating their 100th anniversary. But the environment has changed dramatically with the advent of mobile money and increased interest from commercial players in the unbanked market.

How Branchless Banking Can Foster Savings Accounts for the Poor

How can government and private sector most affect the uptake and usage of branchless banking among the unserved majority by 2020?

Was SKS Ready for the IPO?

With an already nervous RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and Ministry of Finance wary of the path being charted out by the Indian MFIs and now SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India), the market regulator asking SKS unpleasant questions, it’s perhaps a time to pause and introspect.

Microinsurance Momentum in the Philippines

Over a hundred practitioners gathered in Manila on Friday, October 1 for a consultation on the new “Roadmap for Financial Literacy on Microinsurance,” an action plan prepared by a Technical Working Group comprised of all the key stakeholders from government, the microfinance and cooperative sectors and the insurance industry.

Is SKS Any Different from Wal-Mart?

We may prefer co-operative banks, which don’t make a lot of money for any one individual but do provide safe and accessible savings products to poor people. In spite of some notable exceptions, however, that’s not the dominant paradigm.