by Jennifer Sturdy and Stephanie Wykstra
Editor's note: This appeared originally in the American Psychological Society's magazine APS Observer.
Media Coverage
December 09, 2016
There are many ways that gender inequality holds us back. But overall, the math is simple: Half the world’s population is financially stunted. As long as we keep suppressing the economic potential of women, we will never achieve the growth and prosperity we want.
Media Coverage
December 09, 2016
Mobile money, a service that allows monetary value to be stored on a mobile phone and sent to other users via text messages, has been adopted by the vast majority of Kenyan households. We estimate that access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty.
Media Coverage
December 09, 2016
National Public Radio's All Things Considered reports on the new study in Science on the effects of mobile money access for poor women in Kenya. Read or listen to the full story featuring IPA affiliates Tavneet Suri and Isaac Mbiti below.
Media Coverage
December 08, 2016
A new study today shows that the expansion of mobile money helped bring hundreds of thousands of Kenyans out poverty, especially those in female-headed households. The study, published in Science, examined how M-PESA, Kenya's text message-based payments system, spread across the country over six years.
Press Release
December 08, 2016
The new study found that poor rural women in Kenya with access to a mobile phone-based service allowing them to send and receive payments at low cost shifted their occupations from agriculture to business and saved more. The combined effects reduced poverty for hundreds of thousands of households.
Media Coverage
December 08, 2016
Popular Science covers the study in Science on poverty and access to M-PESA mobile money in Kenya.
Media Coverage
December 08, 2016
Reuters looks at the new findings in Science on mobile money and poverty in Kenya.
Media Coverage
December 08, 2016
IPA Researcher and board member Tavneet Suri of MIT speaks with Vox about her new findings, published in Science. The research, conducted with with Billy Jack and IPA, looked at the how poverty was reduced in Kenya as M-PESA expanded and made mobile money more widely available in the country. Read more at the link below.
November 14, 2016
Matthew Jukes
October 27, 2016
The Health and Literacy Intervention (HALI) project replaced expensive in-person coaching with text messages and found that they effectively supported teachers in improving their pedagogy, helped children learn to read, and reduced dropout by 50 percent (full study summary here, paper...
Media Coverage
October 08, 2016
Getting a microloan is far easier than getting a bank loan. But in east Africa many people have access to an even easier source of credit. It takes just a few taps on a phone to obtain a short-term loan, which will arrive in a mobile-money account almost immediately. It is an exciting, scary development, says Dean Karlan, a development economist at Yale University.
Media Coverage
October 06, 2016
The theme of this year’s Global Handwashing Day on October 15, 2016, is “Make Handwashing a Habit!” In places without access to piped water, new products and technologies are needed to make handwashing with soap convenient enough to become a habit. Handwashing with soap is a powerful weapon against diarrhea and respiratory illness, the leading causes of death among children under 5. It is estimated that handwashing with soap could save 1 million lives annually. Unfortunately, only 19 percent of the global population wash their hands with soap after contact with feces.
Media Coverage
October 05, 2016
For the 2.5 billion people who live on less than $2 per day, shocks such as illness, crop failures, livestock deaths, farming-equipment breakdowns and even wedding or funeral expenses can be enough to tip them, their families, or even an entire community below the poverty line. A major challenge for international development efforts is determining which financial tools provide durable buffers against such setbacks.
Media Coverage
September 12, 2016
Der schnelle und unkomplizierte Geldtransfer mit dem Mobiltelefon ist ein großer Zukunftstrend, auch in Entwicklungsländern. In Kenia hat „Mobile Money“ laut einer Studie schon zahlreichen Menschen aus der Armut geholfen.
Media Coverage
August 10, 2016
Rural demand for electricity connections is significantly lower than the Kenyan government predicted, even when connection costs are highly subsidised, according to economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
