Articles by Jake Kendall
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Guest Articles
Wednesday
May 17
2017From Biometrics to Chatbots: Two Technology Challenges Aim to Help Governments Digitize their Economies
There is a growing consensus that emerging-market governments should digitize their economies, starting with the vast streams of payments they themselves make and receive. The DFS Lab is launching two technology challenges to fund new technologies that enable this transition: a Biometrics Challenge and a Chatbots Challenge. The deadline to enter is May 30.
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- Technology
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Monday
January 2
2017A Week at the Cutting Edge: Eight Insights into Emerging Market Fintech
This post by Jake Kendall and Stephen Deng, about innovators prototyping and testing new fintech ideas at the first DFS Lab Fintech Bootcamp in Dar es Salaam, was December's most popular. It's now in the running for Most Influential Post of 2016. Today's the last day to vote for it – or any of the other 11 entrants. The winner will be announced Wednesday.
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- Technology
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Guest Articles
Wednesday
August 31
2016It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid: Exploring the “digital poverty stack” – Part 2
In the first post in this series, we proposed that donors and governments advance digital and financial inclusion by focusing more on creating public goods that enable the broader ecosystem, rather than on peripheral innovation in service delivery. In this second post, we discuss the implications of this shift and highlight some new efforts to move the fields in the right direction.
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- Social Enterprise, Technology
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Monday
August 29
2016It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid – Exploring the ‘Digital Poverty Stack,’ Part 1
Donor investments to leverage technology have largely failed to achieve their imagined potential, often producing sub-scale pilot projects which do not solve a real problem. Instead, donors should focus on building a “digital poverty stack,” a set of interoperable and reusable digital tools that can be built into a large number of applications.
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- Technology
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Tuesday
June 30
2015Central Bankers Shouldn’t Fret Over Mobile Money: Research says it doesn’t cause inflation, and could be beneficial in monetary policy
Research conducted by the University of Oxford for the Gates Foundation shows that the growth of mobile money will be neutral or (if anything) beneficial to the conduct of well-designed monetary policy. The authors believe this will be "a solid new brick in our fact base around digital financial services."
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- Technology
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Monday
November 24
2014NexThought Monday – Unlocking Mobile Data: Regulatory and privacy issues prevent metadata use from realizing its full potential
African countries are not data-rich environments but, because of high mobile phone use, they could be. And that data could be used to track, among other things, importation routes for infectious disease, patterns of migration or economic transactions.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Tuesday
November 12
2013Expanding the Platform: What’s holding back Kenya’s mobile money ecosystem – and how to improve it
Kenya leads the world in mobile money, but the wildly successful M-Pesa platform is still used mainly for remittances. For the country to realize its mobile finance potential, it must develop a much broader range of payment use cases, says Jake Kendall. He challenged a team of researchers to identify the country’s mobile finance challenges and to come up with solutions - here’s what they found.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- mobile finance, research
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Tuesday
October 29
2013Tapping the Network to Fight Poverty: How targeting influential leaders can increase financial innovation uptake
Whether you measure it by Twitter followers or by how crowded your kitchen is at dinnertime, it’s clear that some people have larger social networks than others. And a few individuals invariably emerge as central points of contact for their larger social groups. Jake Kendall of Gates Foundation discusses innovative research suggesting that these network “hubs” can propel the diffusion of financial innovations at the BoP.
- Categories
- Education