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Success at Scale: How CARD Bank activated 480,000 poor savers in the Philippines
Grameen Foundation recently completed an innovative 4-year project with CARD Bank in the Philippines. Their goal: to provide access to secure, accessible and convenient savings accounts targeted to the poor. Julie Peachey describes how Grameen helped the bank open 480,000 new active savings accounts and create the infrastructure for implementation of mobile financial services, while helping its partner ensure sustainability.
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- Uncategorized
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Building the Business Case for Youth Financial Services: UNCDF, MasterCard Foundation provide lessons for financial services providers
Of the 1.2 billion youth in the world, 130 million are out of school, 45 percent live on less than US $2 a day, and 50 percent do not participate in the labor force. Is there a business case for creating financial products for them? YouthStart tested approaches for serving low-income young people in a sustainable manner, and their recent report aims to inform successful long- term strategy for financial service providers.
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- Education
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Cash Cows: Why making bank accounts function like livestock will help the poor
In an age of mobile banking and digital transactions, many poor people still shun basic banking services and put their extra money in livestock. Why? Cows make sense as a savings tool in ways that bank accounts don’t, says Ignacio Mas. He suggests several ways banks could create products with similar properties to livestock, helping the poor use their accounts more intuitively.
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- Agriculture
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We Have Seen the Future, and It’s Universal: Single-payer systems being penciled onto BoP health care’s ‘blank slate’
There’s a worldwide movement toward universal health coverage because, as one expert says, “systems that rely on direct, out-of-pocket expenditures lead to inequities. … They just don’t work very well.” Next up is identifying the sources of financing and care.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Friction and Flow: How innovation can put relevance back into formal savings
Do you realize to what extent formal savings services are irrelevant to many of the world’s poor?Ignacio Mas explores the challenges of making savings products both relevant and simple, in a thought-provoking addition to NextBillion Financial Innovation’s opening series.
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- Uncategorized
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Saving Themselves: Why young people are asking for better savings services
The importance of savings to financial inclusion is well-established - at least for adults. But the conversation about youth savings is marked by skepticism about young people’s ability to save, compounded by the fact that many of them are not (or shouldn’t be) working. Rani Deshpande, director of Save the Children’s YouthSave project, discusses why youth savings must be a priority, and how the financial inclusion community can help.
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- Uncategorized
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