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Microfinance for Refugee Populations: What We’ve Learned and Where to Go Next
Currently, 21.3 million people are registered with United Nations agencies as refugees, and their financial inclusion has become a matter of importance and urgency. The Social Performance Task Force has been working to identify the refugees' needs and recently compiled some guidelines, “Serving Refugee Populations: The Next Financial Inclusion Frontier,” for financial service providers.
- Categories
- Finance
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Don’t Just Color It Pink and Call It Financial Inclusion for Women
To close the financial inclusion gender gap, providers will have to do more than simply making cosmetic changes to their existing services. To that end, more than 100 financial regulators and policymakers recently gathered in Fiji and adopted a 10-point proposal focused on creating regulatory and operational environments conducive to bringing financial products and services to women – a possible game-changer for women’s financial inclusion.
- Categories
- Finance, Uncategorized
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How Catalyst Fund Helped PayGo Energy Build a Foundation for Growth
As startups move past a proof of concept and start to scale, they require whole new sets of systems, operational processes and skills that will allow them to grow and expand. A well-thought-out backend system can help make the transition, but building it requires a team with the technical expertise to implement the right changes.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Tags
- fintech, microfinance
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Where Aggregators – and Open APIs – Fit Into Financial Inclusion
The introduction of a truly Open API is an exciting prospect for individuals and institutions interested in financial inclusion – digital financial providers, economists, technologists and developers alike. Building a successful business model, however, requires that the Open API is technically sound and that the financial inclusion community is included and encouraged to collaborate on innovative solutions.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Mobile Money Meets Microcredit: Three Key Decisions in Taking a Concept from Design to Pilot
SAJIDA Foundation in Bangladesh is using evidence from data analytics, business case analysis and client research to improve cross-selling as part of the OPTIX project. Three key evidence-based programmatic decisions were necessary to take a new mobile financial service-based microfinance initiative from the design table to being piloted in the field.
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- Finance
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What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate: Three Ways to Bridge the Academic/Practitioner Gap
Evidence-based policymaking requires a collaborative relationship between the worlds of research, policy and practice. But productive three-way communication between these actors is difficult, as vague prejudices can limit each side's ability to listen and learn. As every failure to communicate is a missed opportunity, Innovations for Poverty Action explores some ways to improve learning and communication.
- Categories
- Finance, Social Enterprise
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IFC to Invest Up to $38M in Three Affordable Housing Finance Firms
International Finance Corporation (IFC) will invest up to $38 million in three housing finance companies in India, as the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm seeks to expand its presence in a segment that offers loans for low-cost houses.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- housing, microfinance
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Did This New Nonprofit Crack the Code for Building Developing World Housing?
Last June, a brand-new nonprofit set a giant goal: Over the summer, they would crowdfund enough money to build an entire neighborhood—100 homes—for earthquake victims in Haiti. They raised the money in 90 days, and by this March ended up building 151 homes, where more than 1,200 people now live.
- Categories
- Finance