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Microcredit Does Not Live Up to Promise of Transforming Lives of the Poor, Six Studies Show
Microcredit—providing small loans to underserved entrepreneurs—has been both celebrated and vilified as a development tool. Six new studies from four continents bring rigorous evidence to this debate, finding that while microcredit has some benefits, it is not a viable poverty alleviation tool.
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World Bank to Commit $1 Billion to “Clean India” Program
World Bank today said it will commit USD 1 billion in the government's Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign. World Bank's country director in India Onno Ruhl said the World Bank is considering considerable large sums of financing for that.
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- South Asia
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- impact investing
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Reaching the Hardest-to-Reach: Financial Services for Overlooked Populations
The growth of microfinance solutions to address pressing development challenges has brought many of the world's formerly "unbanked" into formal financial systems. However, one group continually remains outside the system -- the poorest of the poor. Even some microfinance programs and deliberately inclusive financial policies remain unaffordable for segments of the population. Across the Global South, a number of initiatives have emerged with the notion that, although access to financial services has expanded in recent years, the remaining need demands innovative actions. We take a look at examples in Lagos, Bogotá, Cairo, and Bangalore.
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Pooling Public-Private Partnership Best Practices
Government leaders today have recognized the need to engage the private sector in development. While in the past, federal agencies supplied the majority of funding going toward developing countries, that percentage has continued to decrease over time — it is now down to around 9 percent. With 91 percent of global development funding now provided by nongovernment sources, the private sector has become a major player in the global development effort, and it is becoming increasingly important to find common objectives that garner their investment.
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Report: Mobile Money Could Be a Silver Bullet for Financial Inclusion in Africa
Mobile money is shaping up to be one of the most exciting areas in mobile communications, and is quickly transforming the way in which consumers and enterprises transact.
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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India’s Financial Inclusion Drive Sets Guinness World Record for Most Bank Accounts Opened in One Week
As many as 11.5 crore bank accounts have been opened under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, exceeding the enhanced target of 10 crore and covering 99.74 per cent of households, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said today.
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- South Asia
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ICICI, India’s Largest Private Sector Bank, Launches Banking Service on Twitter
ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank, on Monday announced the launch of banking services on Twitter, the first of its kind service, in India.
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- South Asia
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Banks Are Now Handing Out Loans to People They’d Normally Shun
Before Jeff Stewart could credibly advance the notion that your Facebook friend network could—or even should—help you get a loan, he had to prove the system worked and was reliable. It took a long time. I first met him in 2012, a year after he’d launched Lenddo, pitching it as a new way for people just entering the middle class to qualify for and receive loans. His startup planned to use Facebook data to assess credit risk, and to make loans to well-qualified candidates, starting in the Philippines.
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