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Making it Easier to Go Digital: Lowering barriers to entry for pro-poor financial institutions in Uganda
In December 2014 Airtel Uganda launched a mobile banking service to allow bank customers to access their accounts through mobile money agents. These services allow pro-poor financial institutions to reach rural Ugandans, but forging these digital connections is complex. In the third post in their series on what it takes for microfinance institutions to go digital, Grameen Foundation explores ways to overcome this complexity.
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- Uncategorized
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3 Key Risks in Going Digital – and How Microfinance Institutions Can Address Them: Grameen Foundation provides risk management tips for MFIs adopting mobile solutions
The speed and convenience that make digital services attractive to clients can bring a host of new risks for financial institutions that serve the poor. In the second post in their series on what it takes for microfinance institutions to go digital, Grameen Foundation explores some of these risks, and what MFIs can do to address them.
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- Uncategorized
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MFTransparency is Dead … What Does That Mean for Pricing Transparency?: The CEO of the influential watchdog initiative discusses the future of pricing transparency in microfinance
MicroFinance Transparency recently announced that it has stopped collecting pricing data for the global microfinance industry. But as CEO Chuck Waterfield explains, that doesn’t mean the movement for transparent pricing is dead. He explains the decision and discusses how the industry can still make fair pricing a reality.
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- Impact Assessment
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Nextbillion’s Most Viewed, Shared Posts in February: Failure, Glorious Failure
The old adage that it’s not news if everything goes according to plan – that applies to blog sites like ours, too. And so, as per usual, stories about failure led the list of our most-viewed and most-shared posts of February. But there was no reveling in schadenfreude here. Rather, we opened the month with a series on what we could learn from failures, brought to us by a burgeoning global organization that has failure right in its name.
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Reaching ‘an Emerging Market Within an Emerging Market’: JPMorgan Chase and Omidyar back new impact fund aimed at Brazil’s middle class
Entrepreneurs who can deliver high-quality basic services on the cheap are rushing to meet the pent-up demands of Brazil’s 112 million lower- and middle-class consumers. Those entrepreneurs can tap a new source of capital: impact investors - including one backed by JPMorgan Chase and the Omidyar Network - focused on the huge population of Brazilians who make under $10,000 a year.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Texting Toward a Better Business: What happened when women in three countries were offered bite-sized bits of business know-how via mobile phones
The Business Women mobile service, developed by the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, the ExxonMobil Foundation and Nokia, offered women bite-sized bits of business know-how via their mobile phones. Every week, thousands of women in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Tanzania received five or six business tips as part of a year-long curriculum.
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- Education, Technology
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Where Ethics and the Enterprise Intersect: 1,001 questions at the 2015 Latin American Impact Investment Forum (FLII)
What is an ethical business? During last month’s Latin America Impact Investing Forum (FLII) Avina’s Bernardo Toro, said it clearly: “It is a business that doesn’t prey on people; one that creates real value; one that pays attention to what’s important, not what’s showy.” Simple and to the point, so why do we struggle with it?
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- Education, Impact Assessment
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Who Moved My Cheese?: A social enterprise discovers that the dairy business is harder than it looks
In a poor region of Bolivia, goat milk producers often drink their own product, for lack of a market. Pro-Milk was launched to help them make and sell cheese instead. But the company was soon undermined by challenges in its business model and region. Fundación IES, a development institution that supported Pro-Milk, tells the story in the latest post in our business failure series.
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- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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