Kenya's The Standard on Digital Consumer Protection Study
Media Coverage
March 17, 2020

Kenya's The Standard reports on a new IPA-funded study with the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) and Financial Sector Deepening (FSD-Kenya) to address common digital credit market and consumer protection issues.
IPA International Women's Day Authors
What We're Reading For International Women's Day
March 05, 2020

Sunday, March 8 is International Women’s Day. To mark the occasion, staff members from IPA’s Financial Inclusion and Small & Medium Enterprise programs are highlighting some readings they find insightful, especially as they pertain to new thinking about women’s entrepreneurship and access to finance in low- and middle-income countries.

Elizabeth Koshy, Program Manager, Small & Medium Enterprises

 

I really like the Household Matters paper by Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, and Natalia Rigol. Previous studies from Ghana and Sri Lanka had shown that...
IPA's Rafe Mazer in African Business Magazine on Digital Finance in Kenya
Media Coverage
February 25, 2020

IPA's Director of Consumer Protection, Rafe Mazer speaks in African Business Magazine on the importance of ensuring that Kenya's fast-growing financial technology sector provides inclusive products and services. Mazer also explains on IPA's blog how the new $5.4 Million initiative he directs aims to help protect consumers in four countries from poor or predatory digital financial services.
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IPA Launches $5.4 Million Initiative to Protect Digital Finance Users
February 07, 2020

The text messages start before my plane even lands in Nairobi.

“MPESA soft loan now Available at 5% interest,@Ksh50,000. Call/sms on XXXXXXXXXX ​​​​​.”

 

My Kenyan SIM is back online, and so are the fake SMS loan offers.

I know not to reply to these messages because they don’t come from a phone number branded with a provider name, let alone the various typos I spot in most of these messages.

But many consumers don’t know the tell-tale signs of a fake loan, or maybe need a loan so bad they want to believe the offer is true. According to the 2019 FinAccess...
IndiaSpend Covers IPA Study on Women's Financial Autonomy
Media Coverage
January 24, 2020

IndiaSpend reports on a study providing women in Madhya Pradesh with personal bank accounts to determine the impact of women's increased financial control on labor market participation and earnings.
MIT Technology Review on IPA Study on Gender-Specific Credit Scoring in the Dominican Republic
Media Coverage
November 22, 2019

MIT Technology Review writes in the wake of Goldman Sach's AppleCard scandal, in which the company's algorithm for lending was criticized for being significantly biased against women, about the potential benefits of gender-differentiated lending practices. The article points to research in the Dominican Republic evaluating a program with women-specific credit scoring found that credit scores improved for 93% of women had higher credit scores using the separate models for men and women than when they were grouped together.
The Dhaka Tribune on IPA Bangladesh Adolescent Health Findings
Media Coverage
July 25, 2019

The Dhaka Tribune recaps a roundtable in which IPA Bangladesh Country Director, Dr. Mohammad Ashraful Haque, presented baseline findings of a survey on adolescent well-being, assessing mental, physical, and sexual/reproductive health as well as educational and economic development. The survey also noted the role of violence in the everyday lives of Dhaka adolescents, finding: 68% of married adolescents experience intimate partner violence, 82% of adolescents report experiencing corporal punishment at school, and 62% of female caregivers use physical punishment to discipline underage family...
IPA Founder Dean Karlan in Peru's El Comercio on Retirement Savings Study
Media Coverage
May 01, 2019

IPA Founder Dean Karlan spoke with one of Peru's largest newspapers, El Comercio, about how to increase contributions to retirement savings in Peru. They discussed how nudges can play an important role in creating saving habits but also noted that reminders for automated payroll individual can be counterproductive and that they might even be best off forgetting they have an account.


 
Paraguay's ABC Color on IPA Pension Program Study
Media Coverage
March 25, 2019

Paraguay's ABC Color reports on a study in progress with the country's Ministry of Finance, testing whether a pension program for senior citizens improves the economic wellbeing and quality of life of its participants.
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Student Loans are Ripe for Behavioral Improvement
Brian Jacob, Damon Jones, Benjamin Keys
February 25, 2019

If you’re a teacher in the United States with a student loan, you can get $5,000 to $17,500 of your student loans forgiven by the federal government after five consecutive years of teaching in low-income schools. To do this, you’d have to first match the eligibility requirements to your position and your loans: If you took maternity leave does that year count? Does your loan count if you took a deferment while you got your Masters? This is detailed in an 8-page, 4,370 word application, linked towards the bottom of an FAQ page on the federal loan. Then you would have to figure out if your...
The Dhaka Tribune Covers IPA's Rebecca Rouse Speaking at 2019 Financial Inclusion Summit
Media Coverage
February 22, 2019

The Dhaka Tribune recaps the 2019 Financial Inclusion Summit held in Dhaka, where IPA's Financial Inclusion Program Director, Rebecca Rouse, delivered a keynote speech. Rouse discussed how digital cash transfers can be more time and cost effective while ensuring greater accessibility and transparency. She cites IPA evidence on mobile money in Kenya and digital payments in Mexico.
Burkina Faso's L'Economiste on IPA's Crop Insurance Research
Media Coverage
February 11, 2019

L'Economiste du Faso features evidence from an IPA study on marketing rainfall insurance to the urban relatives of rural farmers to increase uptake for the latter's benefit.
Kenya's The Star on IPA Study Giving Bank Accounts to Rural Households
Media Coverage
January 28, 2019

The Star reports on an IPA study that tested the impact of providing rural households in Kenya with bank accounts for the first time. Although the overall use of these accounts was low, they helped some households to be more financially stable and independent.
The Chicago Booth Review Features IPA Research on Debt Traps
Media Coverage
January 28, 2019

The Chicago Booth Review features IPA research by our founder Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Benjamin N. Roth on loan forgiveness while highlighting why so many people struggle to escape debt. To test the idea of “debt traps” the researchers paid off the high-interest debt of market vendors in the Philippines and India and found that most of the participants were back in debt within six weeks.
IPA's Rebecca Rouse in The Daily Mail on Why More Low-Income Americans Live Unbanked
Media Coverage
January 04, 2019

IPA's Financial Inclusion Program Director, Rebecca Rouse, explains why many lower-income Americans live unbanked, without a checking or savings account. They are also more likely to rely on making payments in cash than middle-income and wealthier Americans who increasingly prefer to go cashless.

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