The ultrapoor want desperately to escape poverty and have richer, more meaningful lives. Governments and NGOs want inclusive growth and prosperity. There is a proven way we can address all these challenges – the ultrapoor graduation model.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab just marked its tenth year anniversary on the MIT campus outside Boston with a one day event which drew over 1200 participants from all over the world.
We are living in the time of Big Data. It comes from everywhere - from our cell phones, our computers, from fuel pumps, water sensors in meteorological stations, and countless other sources.
The changing landscape of finance is a huge subject so let’s start with a short history of banking (thanks here to Wikipedia). The word actually comes from banca or bench where the moneylenders sat.
Did you know that there are over 2.5 billion people without any bank accounts in the world, and most of them are in Asia? And less than one quarter of the world’s 2.4 billion poor have a bank account. Managing their money using formal financial services – savings accounts, loans, insurance, and remittances -- is a wonderful, terrible, impossible dream for many, many families.
There is a delicate balance in everything. Gender and diversity is the same. Within many organizations there have been significant historic challenges in rebalancing the numbers of men and women, and treating everyone more fairly.
A completely different way of thinking about how to address chronic and severe poverty has emerged. And this idea works. The evidence is preliminary but it is quite strong, and there is more coming very soon.
Policymakers are swamped. They have a wide range of interest groups talking to them all the time. They have large numbers of papers and emails and phone calls to deal with every day. So if you approach them with a brilliant evaluation that is fifty pages long, complete with graphs and tables and lots of Greek equations, it will go straight to the bottom of the stack. And stay there.
