Mobile remittances

This post from Foreign Policy‘s Passport Blog outlines the potential of mobile phones as tools for immigrant remittances. Most of the world’s poor don’t have access to banks – as the microfinance movement has been making very clear for decades. But more and more of them have access to phones – some of this access [...]

Microlending. Good for them but not for us.

Wednesday’s WSJ ran a story titled, “Silicon Valley Moguls Support Microlenders, Just not in the US,” in which the profitability of social good ventures is highlighted as the central question. Because of higher costs and legally-required lower interest rates, US-based microlending programs can do a lot of good, but they can’t do it at a [...]