Latin America

Host Elizabeth Weingarten talks to Andrés Martinez about the student-led protest movement in Mexico tied to the July presidential election and with Lisa Guernsey about the dark side of summer vacation for kids in the U.S.

By: Ryan Newton, Women’s World Banking; Oshala Bandara, Hatton National Bank

Cross-posted on YouthSave.org

Around the world, girls as young as 10 years old accumulate money regularly, manage it actively, and want a safe place to save it. Unfortunately, financial institutions are traditionally oriented towards adults as customers and do not see youth as a viable target market. In an effort to shift the status quo, Women’s World Banking (WWB) joined 12 financial institutions in Sri Lanka last month to ensure that youth have access to comprehensive savings programs during its first international “Innovations in Youth Savings” workshop. Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, says that, “girls have been left behind in so many ways, including not having a way to build savings in their own name.” To address this issue, Ms. Iskenderian mentioned that, “Women’s World Banking is committed to helping financial institutions design savings products for young women and girls because we know that the development of saving and financial management skills will lead to an increased tendency among girls to pursue higher education, create businesses of their own, marry at a later age, or become property owners – all of which have broader implications for reducing poverty.”

By Alejandra Montes Saenz, Save the Children Colombia

Cross-posted on YouthSave.org

The meaning of Russian President Vladimir Putin's third term and updates on immigration policy and trends are topics for discussion in this week’s podcast.  Host Pamela Chan is joined by Schwartz Fellows Steve Levine and Tamar Jacoby.  

To learn more about today’s topics, check out:

Steve’s blog, The Oil and the Glory (http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/ ) and book, Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia (http://www.amazon.com/Putins-Labyrinth-Spies-Murder-Russia/dp/0812978412)

“The only thing that matters in the world is China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter. Consciously. People don’t give one damn about Latin America now.” That was the assessment President Richard Nixon shared with a young White House aide named Donald Rumsfeld when the latter expressed an interest in bolstering his foreign policy experience. Nixon was speaking a mere decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a time when Communists were taking over in Chile and acting up in South America.

The UNDP’s recently released report, “Mobile Technologies and Empowerment: Enhancing human development through participation and innovation,” is exceptional for straddling the gap between tech hype and tech reality while providing direction as to how best to advance development goals. The report also serves as a perfect complement to the Global Savings and Social Protection initiative’s recent work on payment infrastructure and infrastructure utilization in showing (among other things) that different contexts demand different technical interventions.

 

By Rani Deshpande, Save the Children

Cross-posted on YouthSave.org

When considering how to reach kids with financial capability programming, schools – an aggregation point for hundreds, sometimes thousands of young people – seem like an obvious place to start.  However, as YouthSave’s programs in Colombia and Nepal have learned, determining how to successfully work with schools to deliver financial capability programming requires almost as much thought and iteration as designing the intervention itself. 

Last month, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) held an event on government-to-person (G2P) payments and financial inclusion. The event was based on a February report, “Social Cash Transfers and Financial Inclusion: Evidence from Four Countries,” which itself was a follow up to a 2009 paper “Banking the Poor via G2P payments” on the same topic.

Yesterday, CGAP hosted an event to discuss their recently released paper, “Social Cash Transfers and Financial Inclusion: Evidence from Four Countries.” The paper was a follow up to a 2009 paper, “Banking the Poor via G2P Payments,” which argued that the convergence of electronic payments and financial inclusion had the potential to achieve several benefits, such as reducing government costs and introducing recipients to the wider world of financial services.

Since at least 1996, when James Gleick wrote “The End of Cash” in the New York Times Magazine, there have been predictions, premonitions, and warnings about an approaching cashless world. Last week, as part of the Slate series “The Cashless Society,” Katy Waldman floated a number of different hypotheses about how that world might affect crime.