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Why India needs to work on financial literacy now more than ever
India is home to 17.5% of the world’s population but nearly 76% of its adult population does not understand even the basic financial concepts. Empirical evidence shows that digital efforts on financial education have had a far greater impact than the traditional media.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Announcing NextBillion Financial Health: New Partnership with MetLife Foundation Reflects the Evolution of Financial Inclusion
NextBillion is officially re-launching our Financial Innovation site with a new name and partner. The site will now be called Financial Health, and it’s being sponsored by MetLife Foundation. The Foundation shares our concept of how the new NextBillion Financial Health site can best serve our readers: By providing a platform for sharing insights, data, and analysis through articles that ask the big question of what works – and what doesn't – in the movement to help more people use financial services to improve the quality of their lives.
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- Uncategorized
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Financial Inclusion Takes the Next Step: An Interview with MetLife Foundation President Dennis White
As NextBillion launches our new Financial Health site under the sponsorship of MetLife Foundation, we touched base with its president and CEO, Dennis White. In this wide-ranging interview, White discusses the evolution of the financial inclusion movement, and the work the foundation is doing to advance it – including its grant-making and investing approach, its ongoing challenges, and what it has learned from both success and failure, among other issues.
- Categories
- Finance
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Inter-American Development Bank Grants Colombia $450 Million USD Loan for Financial System Reforms
According to the IDB, the proposed reforms will aim to solidify macroeconomic stability, boost development, encourage public/private partnership financing, strengthen regulation of the financial system, promote financial inclusion, and heighten the country’s ability to monitor progress in these areas.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Latin America
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Lessons Learned Using Mobile Tools to Compile Financial Diary Data
Financial diary methodology is a powerful tool for studying financial inclusion, especially if digital tools are used. Using a mobile data collection and analysis app (which also worked offline) and a cloud-hosted database, Catholic Relief Services drew household data from rural areas in real time and amassed thousands of data points generated by tracking people’s financial lives each week.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Tags
- data, financial inclusion, fintech, research
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UN Study: Digitization of Kenyan Farmer Payments Helps Tackle Poverty
One Acre Fund, supported by Citi, enabled farmers to easily make loan repayments via mobile money instead of cash, reducing the uncertainty, inefficiency, insecurity and high costs previously caused by cash transactions.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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World Bank report highlights role of Agent Banking in Malaysia’s successful financial inclusion push
Malaysia has achieved one of the highest levels of financial inclusion among middle-income countries. According to data from the central bank, 92% of the adult population in Malaysia had a bank account in 2015, the second highest rate in ASEAN after Singapore.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Digital Toolkit to Give Tanzania Smallholder Farmers Access to Finance, Farm Supplies and Training
The digital toolkit will allow farmers to gradually pre-pay for the inputs they need via mobile money, at discounted prices. It will also provide them with a customized inputs package based on their crop and production goals, and deliver mobile-phone based farming advice to ensure the best use of those inputs.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa