In Support of Micro-Savings

In reply to Holden’s post on GiveWell, one of my favorite blogs…
I would have to disagree with David & Basti.
MFIs do not want to provide savings products for many different reasons, but most of all because it is less profitable. The ROI on savings is far lower than that for MFIs, and so MFIs avoid [...]

Approval from Mongu!

You may have been wondering why I have not written in a few weeks. No, it is not because I have been lazy, but because my main project, implementing Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILC) in Western Province was postponed until an important visit was made.
Last week I took the bus seven hours to Mongu [...]

Fighting Poverty from Space

What if the first world trained its eyes on developing nations? Daily monitoring from satellites in orbit overhead is a reality today, and the pictures are becoming just as clear of the fields in Zambia or los campos de El Salvador as they are of the home where I grew up in the US.  As [...]

Gender Roles in Rural Zambia

This past week I spent observing farmer field school trainings in the town of Choma. On the last day the facilitator conducted an exercise on gender differences on farms. Two of the four groups drew pie charts of an average male and female day; what activities they performed at each hour during the day. The [...]

Sachs! Easterly! Neither!

For anyone unfamiliar with the international development debate, Sachs and Easterly present polar opposite perspectives on how the international community can and has supported or failed to advance the development of growing nations.
Sachs contends that international aid and development has been positive, but it is not enough. We have all the tools, but the intensity [...]