Articles by Elisabeth Rhyne
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Guest Articles
Tuesday
December 6
2022From Grameen Bank to Global Scale: The New Edition of a Classic Book Highlights the Hard Truth – And Enduring Value – Behind Microfinance
In 1996, Grameen Foundation founder Alex Counts published “Small Loans, Big Dreams,” a well-regarded account of the origins and early years of the microfinance sector. Counts recently published a new edition of the book, which reflects on the ongoing evolution of the industry, and responds to critics who have questioned its role in international development. Longtime microfinance leader and analyst Elisabeth Rhyne discusses the book, and explores what these new updates tell us about the current state of the global microfinance sector.
- Categories
- Finance
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Guest Articles
Monday
May 4
2020Banking on Human Capital: What Financial Institutions Need to Do – Now – to Enable a COVID-19 Recovery
Every crisis carries its own unique signature, and COVID-19 is likely to be defined by a series of flare-ups and lockdowns, says Elisabeth Rhyne at the Financial Access Initiative. Within that scenario, the financial inclusion sector needs to determine the most effective ways to reduce the pandemic's impact on vulnerable people and businesses – and it needs to start immediately.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Finance
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Guest Articles
Monday
March 30
2020Financial Health and the Coronavirus: Another Failure to Prepare
Even before the coronavirus crisis, global financial health was surprisingly precarious, with many people unprepared to weather a significant financial shock. As Elisabeth Rhyne points out, this issue is becoming painfully clear now that the pandemic is causing mass disruptions in income and employment. She explores the lasting consequences this will have, and calls on policymakers to provide relief now – and to make financial health an urgent priority going forward.
- Categories
- Finance
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Thursday
June 14
2018Is Financial Inclusion Stalling? The 2017 Findex Results Raise Several Red Flags
The Global Financial Inclusion Database (Findex) - one of the most authoritative yardsticks on the state of financial inclusion - finds that 69 percent of the world’s adults now have bank or mobile money accounts. But while that's an exciting headline, it's also misleading, as millions of those newly opened accounts are lying dormant. And that's just one reason why industry stakeholders have found the latest Findex data underwhelming. Elisabeth Rhyne and Sonja Kelly at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion unpack some of the troubling stats – and highlight a few bright spots.
- Categories
- Finance
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Wednesday
October 18
2017The Financial Lives of Struggling Americans: The Financial Diaries and The Unbanking of America
Elisabeth Rhyne of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion reviews two new books that take a look Americans' increasingly precarious financial lives. Both books examine America's top economic challenge – the crumbling of the economic foundation for many working-class and middle-class families – and they do so through the lens of financial services, an unusual but revealing perspective, Rhyne writes.
- Categories
- Finance
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Tuesday
March 28
2017Dollar by Dollar or Goat by Goat: How Financial Health Translates Across Oceans
The Center for Financial Services Innovation, in partnership with the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explored how a U.S.-oriented financial health framework could translate into a developing world context. They discovered that the concept of financial health resonates just as strongly in lower-income countries as it does in the United States.
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- Uncategorized
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Tuesday
October 18
2016What is Lost in a Digital Financial World — And How to Get it Back
As we work to extend financial services to the two billion financially excluded people around the world, we must rely on digital financial services. But vital as they are to financial inclusion, in the transformation to digital interfaces, valuable personal connections between financial service providers and customers are lost. Elisabeth Rhyne explores what exactly is lost, and how that loss can be mitigated or replaced.
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- Uncategorized
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Wednesday
October 5
2016The G2P Silver Bullet? Not So Fast.
Many governments offer cash transfers to millions of people at or below the poverty line, most of whom are not connected to the formal financial system. If these cash transfers are funneled into bank accounts rather than paid directly out in cash, these people immediately gain an on-ramp to financial services. But there is a resounding dissonance between enthusiasm for this solution, and the evidence to date.
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- Uncategorized
