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Runaway Trains of Thought: How Boosting Cognitive Bandwidth Can Fight Poverty
Cognitive bandwidth allows humans to reason, focus and resist impulses – and unfortunately, we have only a limited amount of it. Everyone struggles to make decisions when they run low on cognitive bandwidth, but the added stress of poverty consumes more of it. Creating simple ways to free this bandwidth, whether through money or time, can elevate helpful anti-poverty programs into transformative ones, according to ideas42.
- Categories
- Financial Inclusion, Health Care
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Mobile Podcasts: A Cost-Effective Way to Boost Financial Literacy in India
As a reader of this blog, you likely find it easy to read and understand instructions about basic banking processes, and breeze through simple transactions like ATM withdrawals. But what about those who lack literacy skills, or who are just getting introduced to the world of finance? Mobile phone podcasts, particularly those delivered to targeted audiences in their language, can be a solution. With the potential to reach more than 1 billion mobile subscribers in India, mobile phone podcasts could bring financial literacy to underserved communities.
- Categories
- Financial Inclusion, Technology
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Why Low-Income Families Don’t Send Their Children to College. Hint: It’s Not Always About Money.
Household income is not the only limiting factor as to why children of low to upper-low income families do not attend or save for university. Significant behavioral reasons are also involved, and ESCALA, which helps families save for higher education, worked with BFA’s customer insights team to identify and develop a plan to help overcome a few of them.
- Categories
- Education, Financial Inclusion
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Venezuela asks the UN to help boost supply of medicines
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has asked for help from the United Nations to boost supplies of medicine. Mr Maduro said the UN had the expertise to normalise the supply and distribution of drugs in the country. Venezuela's Medical Federation said recently that hospitals had less than 5% of the medicines they needed. The president blames the problems on an economic war against his government and the sharp fall in oil prices.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
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FinTech’s Elephant Seal Problem
Like the elephant seal, most fintech companies are focused on growing as large as possible. That means they usually choose a free business model to facilitate growth. Kristen Berman and Wendy De La Rosa of the Common Cents Lab say there's a better way: Abandon the free model and focus on removing the true psychological barriers to financial management.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Financial Inclusion, Technology
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Social Business Roundup: Laureate Education Goes Big, Omidyar Gives Directly, Surdna Foundation Embraces Impact Investing
In social business news this week, the world's biggest for-profit college company raised $490 million in its public debut, Omidyar Network gave a $493,000 grant to support GiveDirectly's mission of sending unconditional cash transfers to the poor, and the Surdna Foundation announced plans to dedicate 10 percent of its endowment ($100 million) to a new impact investing fund. Read about these developments and more in our news roundup.
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How Technology Can Provide Microentrepreneurs With Simple – and Much-Needed – Rules of Thumb
Microentrepreneurs have the potential to be a growth engine for developing countries, but they often lack business and financial management training. A recent project suggests that behavioral design has the power to unlock the potential of these microentrepreneurs, markedly improving their financial practices and business outcomes and leading to the financial well-being of their families.
- Categories
- Education, Entrepreneurship
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Beyond RCTs: How Rapid-Fire Testing Can Build Better Financial Products
Rapid-fire tests are nimble randomized controlled trials specifically aimed at improving product design. They are already common practice among technology-based companies as a way to iterate and rapidly improve their product and expand their user-base, but they can also be used to answer questions about the demand for financial products and improve other interventions that help the world’s poor. Innovations for Poverty Action explores what these trials can and cannot do.
- Categories
- Financial Inclusion
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