Articles by Jake Kendall
-
Friday
October 4
2013New Evidence on How Poverty Affects Decision Making: And what the business, development community can learn from it
Many previous studies of poor populations show a relationship between poverty and counterproductive behavior. But new research in the August issue of Science magazine presents some very important evidence on how poverty affects decision making through a different channel.
- Categories
- Education
-
Tuesday
August 27
2013Bringing Payments Out of the Shadows: New data on how South Asian and Indonesian households pay and make money transfers
Payments are the glue of the economic system, and any inefficiency there ripples through the rest of the economy. Yet despite the fact that digital payments and remittances are critical for the poor to be able to access markets and formal financial services, there is very little data collected on the development of the payment market. But now, new research from South Asia and Indonesia is helping to shine a light on the subject.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- research
-
Tuesday
January 15
2013Of Bank Accounts and Behavioural Economics: Will adaptive learning improve money management interfaces for the poor?
One of the biggest financial challenges anyone faces is the interrelated tasks of budgeting, paying, and saving from income. The rich and poor alike need help in this regard and there has been plenty of work by behavioural economists showing how reminders to follow through on savings behaviours, commitment accounts, account labelling, automatic deposits, formal commitments to friends, and other features.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Friday
December 14
2012A Light Bulb Goes On: A Major Innovation in Asset Finance: M-KOPA’s model could illuminate other sectors
The creators of M-KOPA , which sells solar base stations that can charge phones, power lights, and other limited applications, has come up with one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen in the mobile money space in some time.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Tags
- solar
-
Tuesday
September 25
2012Keep the Change: Lost Profits Offer Yet Another Reason Why Mobile Money is Better than Cash: A recent study shows African SMEs lose up to 8% in profits just fetching change
Jon Robinson, who is running the Gates Foundation’s four savings impact random control trials, and co-authors did a study of 500 or so small and medium sized enterprises in western Kenya. They found that these small informal firms spend an average of two hours per week looking for change to complete transactions. This contributes not only to lost productivity, it means losing 5-8 percent of profits.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Tuesday
August 21
2012Going Beyond Remittances: Why SMEs Should be a Key Market Segment for Mobile Money Operators
Many expect that SMEs could benefit substantially from mobile money as a tool to manage payments and working capital, given that it offers an electronic cash substitute for sending payments and storing working capital along with rudimentary record keeping. However, while mobile money use by SMEs is widespread, it is not yet deep.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Wednesday
August 8
2012New Data Reveals Massive (Potential) Mobile Money Market for the Poor : Across Africa millions are sending huge volumes of domestic remittances – mostly in cash
A few months back I wrote this quick piece highlighting some preliminary findings from data that was just coming in from a major study the Gallup organization did for us.
Now, the full data set is in and the results are quite interesting.
In collaboration with Gallup, we surveyed 11 countries in Africa (including Kenya) on the payment habits of the adult population. To my knowledge, this is the largest study of its kind – tracking money transfer and payment behavior in the developing world.- Categories
- Education, Technology
-
Tuesday
February 28
2012The Big Idea: Domestic Remittances in Africa – Demand is There, Will the Teleco’s Step Up?
Our team added a module of over 30 questions on payments to the Gallup World Poll in 8 countries (1,000 respondents each were queried in Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Rwanda, D.R. Congo, Zambia, and Kenya). Questions in the module assessed respondents’ payment behaviors through services such as money transfers, international remittances, government and wage payments, and utilities and other bills.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- research