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Towards a New Model for International Research Collaboration: Reflections on the April YouthSave Research Advisory Council Convening and Symposium

May 16, 2012
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By Julia Stevens and Li Zou, Center for Social Development

Cross posted on YouthSave.org

On April 17, 2012, a Symposium on International Research and Innovation at Washington University in St. Louis highlighted the experiences and insights of the international research partners in YouthSave. The event, which was hosted by the Center for Social Development at Washington University’s Brown School, drew an engaged audience of students, researchers, and program representatives with interests in international research and collaboration.

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Savings Song Launches YouthSave's Financial Education Workshops in Colombia

May 11, 2012
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By Alejandra Montes Saenz, Save the Children Colombia

Cross-posted on YouthSave.org

As part of the overall Financial Capability strategy for Colombia, Save the Children has conducted several launch events in the same schools where the implementation of the financial capability workshops will take place. The overall goal of these events is to gather the students, teachers and school staff and encourage them to start thinking about the importance of saving as a mechanism for young people to achieve their goals and dreams. We used ‘edutainment’ strategies—different forms of entertainment to deliver educational messages—to develop a fun and interactive design for the youths’ first encounter to financial capability topics, so that positive expectations could be built around the upcoming financial capability workshops.

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Global Assets Project Podcast: Farewell to the Greenback

May 7, 2012
Fans of the West Wing will fondly remember Rob Lowe’s character Sam Seaborn’s passionate diatribe against the penny, which this year our Canadian neighbors decided to get rid of. Author David Wolman, who recently sat down with the New American Foundation’s Global Assets Project for an interview, recently lived without cash for one year as research for his book “The End of Money,” which he initially thought would be a “eulogy meets valentine to banknotes and little metal plugs.”
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Evaluating School-Based Financial Education Programs: What Can We Learn from Field Evidence?

  • By
  • Rodrigo Sermeno
May 4, 2012
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Recently, I attended “Conversations that Build and Strengthen Youth Economic Opportunities” hosted by Making Cents International. The event featured Hidde van der Veer of Aflatoun, a Dutch NGO providing social and financial education to children, and Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan of  Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), an organization dedicated to discovering what works for the world’s poor. The speakers shared the preliminary results of their RCT evaluation of the efficacy of school-based financial education programs in Ghana, a country where YouthSave also operates. While their research measured only the short-term effects of these interventions, it nonetheless offers valuable insights into youth labor market participation, risk taking, and most importantly, savings behaviors and attitudes.

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Ron Paul's Big Idea

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan
May 4, 2012
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Although the race for the Republican nomination is all but over, Ron Paul has brought issues to the fore that would otherwise have remained obscure. One of his classic refrains – one that has received support in different forms from the likes of Allen Greenspan and Robert Zoellick – is to shut down the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard. Although this proposal is rarely seen as feasible, a similar movement is picking up steam in both domestic and international contexts: the call to do away with physical currency.

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YouthSave News Flash: Bank of Kathmandu Launches Youth Savings Account for Low-Income Youth

  • By
  • Rodrigo Sermeno
April 30, 2012
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The YouthSaveConsortium is pleased to announce that on April 25th, the BankofKathmandu (BoK) launched its “BoK Chetanshil Yuwa Bachat Yojana (CYBY)” (meaning ‘Conscientious Youth Savings Plan’) – a savings account tailored for low-income youth aged 10 to 22.

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My Account, My Future: Youth feedback and other observations from the pilot evaluation in Kenya

April 30, 2012
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By: Corrinne Ngurukie, Save the Children; Moses Njenga, KIPPRA; and Vilma Ilic, Columbia University

Cross-posted on youthsave.org

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Financial Inclusion Hits the Headlines (at least for the World Bank & Mexico)

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan
April 24, 2012
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This past Sunday, the World Bank partnered with the government of Mexico to host “Financial Inclusion: from Principles to Action.” In addition to a high level opening plenary with H.R.H. Princess Maxima of the Netherlands and Mexican Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade, the event included sessions on financial inclusion, the role of the private sector, financial literacy and consumer protection.

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Why M-PESA Can Increase Financial Inclusion but Won’t Displace Cash in Kenya

  • By
  • Rodrigo Sermeno
April 23, 2012
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Last month, the Central Bank of Nigeria began a pilot in Lagos aimed at reducing the high dominance of cash in the economy by imposing limits on cash transactions. In similar fashion, Sweden, through its emphasis on technology and innovation, is likely to become the world’s first cashless economy. The emergence of electronic money (e-money) in these two countries has revived the discourse over the future of cash, but in particular, the rise of e-money has opened the debate about the ways to leverage the benefits of this technology for financial development in the developing world.

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5 Ways Jim Yong Kim Can Save the World Bank

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan,
  • New America Foundation
April 18, 2012 |

Jim Yong Kim, selected  as the World Bank's new leader on Monday, has his work cut out for him. Sure, the bank has helped halve the poverty in the developing world over the past two decades -- part of the first Millennium Development Goals -- but progress in South Asia has dwarfed that in Africa, and 1 billion people will still live below the poverty line by 2015. And there's more bad news for Kim: The World Bank's narrow economic approach to poverty eradication simply will not work today, because the root causes of certain types of poverty are as structural as they are economic.

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