Global Assets Project

Archives: Global Assets Project Articles and Op-Eds

Entrepreneurs Take to the Seas for Inspiration

  • By
  • Eric Tyler,
  • New America Foundation
January 25, 2013 |

What happens when you mix 11 budding startups with Google executives, Stanford professors, a Nobel Peace Laureate and 600 college students and put them on a ship to circumnavigate the world?

An experiment launched this month called Unreasonable at Sea hopes that this eclectic group will unleash global entrepreneurship.

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Mobile Networks are Missing Out on a Huge Market in Transferring Money to the World’s Poor

  • By
  • Anjana Ravi,
  • Nicole Tosh,
  • New America Foundation
November 21, 2012 |

Mobile money has an estimated potential worldwide revenue of $1 trillion within the next three years, and has become the “it” technology of the moment. The ability to send and receive money through cell phones simplifies the transaction process and offers customers both mobility and flexibility in managing their money. The most notable mobile money platform in the developing world, Kenya’s M-PESA, had 17 million subscribers as of December 2011, and other countries throughout the developed and developing world are quickly jumping on the bandwagon.

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A New Direction For Financial Inclusion?

  • By
  • Anjana Ravi,
  • Eric Tyler,
  • New America Foundation
November 18, 2012 |
At the beginning of last month, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) created a high-level committee focused on getting India’s financial inclusion efforts back on track. However, without a radical shift in direction, the committee will fail to be more than a false hope in a bureaucratic nightmare.
 
India is home to the largest unbanked population in the world. Sixty five per cent of adults across the country are excluded from the formal financial system.
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Map: What Countries Have the Worst Gender Gaps?

  • By
  • Jamie M. Zimmerman,
  • Nicole Tosh,
  • Nick McClellan,
  • New America Foundation
October 11, 2012 |

For more information, see Investing in Girls, a paper that looks at how linking technology and savings-focused cash transfers can help close the global gender gap.

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5 Ways to Put Global Poverty Back on (Whichever) President’s Agenda

  • By
  • Jamie M. Zimmerman,
  • New America Foundation
September 22, 2012 |

In the video above, Jamie Zimmerman explores ways that either presidential candidate can strengthen America's global development agenda post-election.

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4 Ways to Prevent Natural Disasters From Becoming Human Tragedies

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan,
  • New America Foundation
August 28, 2012 |

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported that the past 12 months have been the warmest the United States has ever experienced. Another NOAA report confirmed what has become increasingly obvious: Climate change is the likely culprit. This summer’s extreme heat has sparked wildfires in states like Colorado. And the American heartland is parched, suffering the worst drought in 50 years; the loss of crops is predicted to drive food prices up nationally this fall.

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Enhancing the Impact of Cash Transfers

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan,
  • New America Foundation
July 13, 2012 |
One of the most successful tools in the fight against poverty, one that has attracted increasing attention over the past decade, is social protection via cash transfers. In fact, the New America Foundation’s Global Savings and Social Protection Database – which focuses on Latin America, Africa, East and Asia – has identified over 90 cash-transfer programs in 45 countries, with over a half billion beneficiaries. As the Chronic Poverty Research Centre puts it, “social protection is critical in preventing descent into chronic poverty and reducing the depth of poverty...
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How Mexico Used Banks to Uplift the Poor

  • By
  • Vishnu Sridharan,
  • New America Foundation
June 26, 2012 |
It’s a tough time to be a banker.
 
Last month, during Germany’s “Blockupy” protests in Frankfurt, police warned bankers not to wear suits and keep a low profile as 25,000 marchers swarmed the streets with banners reading “Break the Banks’ Power!” Earlier in Spain, riot police protected Caja Madrid bank as citizens made clear their view that the bank “cheats, defrauds and throws people out of their houses.”
 
In Mexico, which last week hosted the G20 summit, the picture is starkly different.
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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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The G2P Opportunity

  • By
  • Jamie Holmes,
  • Jamie M. Zimmerman,
  • New America Foundation
April 17, 2012 |

Abstract: Around the world, increasingly widespread cash-based social protection schemes - programmes delivering cash payments to over 750 million people among the world's most vulnerable populations - are creating opportunities, particularly through new delivery mechanisms. Policymakers and experts working in financial inclusion, social policy, human development, and behavioural economics have expressed wide interest in leveraging this shift in delivery approaches by incorporating mechanisms that either enable or encourage savings behaviour.

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