Steve Barth | Reflexions

Mobile Technologies & Grassroots Communities

When a poor family borrows money to pay for a used handset and a few minutes of airtime, critics of microfinance complain that this is the kind of unnecessary expense that keeps them poor. They miss the productivity boost and market information that can make a first phone so valuable in grassroots economies.

Unlike Americans, who migrated to wireless networks after more than a century of ubiquitous landline service, many poor nations were never able to establish a landline infrastructure. Today's mobile phone user in the Third World has often leapfrogged to mobile calling directly from having to walk to town in order to have a conversation.

In "Give a Village a Phone," published last month in Mobile Enterprise magazine, I talk about the opportunities to improve the effectiveness and scale of microfinance operations by taking advantage of mobile data and communications. Mobile phones and wireless networks have proven a much better technology platform than PC and land lines. The trick is to build systems and processes that are appropriate for the communities that will use them.

Inclusive Finance in Kenya

On behalf of my Thai client, I attended a meeting of the UN Advisors Group on Inclusive Financial Sectors in Nairobi, hosted by Equity Bank, a local microfinance institution that has not only grown to capture a third of the local market for bank accounts, but also become a symbol of national pride, as chronicled in the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

The day after the advisors meeting, we left hotels early in four-wheel drive vehicles and headed north on the highway that climbs along the ridge overlooking the Rift Valley. On the way the road passed through slum areas, new suburban housing developments and ultimately agricultural land and green open country. By the time we left the highway to turn eastward, we were more than 9000 feet above sea level.

Profitable or Predatory?

While there are many successful examples of inclusive finance in America, there is a growing buzz about "predatory" practices that take advantage of the poor. It's quite possible that a backlash—including regulation by Congress and prosecution by state attorneys general—could affect the legitimate efforts as well as the worst practices. I notice that there is a lot of debate, for example, about whether payday lending is predatory or legitimate microcredit.

BusinessWeek has a compelling cover story for the May 21 issue: "The Poverty Business Inside U.S. companies' audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation's working poor."

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Sachs Appeal

Columbia Prof. Jeff Sachs—development economist, government advisor and poverty abolitionist—is delivering the 2007 Reith Lectures. The weekly series comes from various global locations via the BBC during April and May. The BBC streams audio and (thanks!) posts transcripts almost immediately. MP3s of each lecture can be downloaded for 7 days only from the site. In the lectures, collectively titled “Bursting at the Seams,” Sachs argues that the world's biggest challenges—global warming, terrorism, poverty, disease and bad governance—require broader and deeper global cooperation. “The search for sustainable development … is perhaps the most urgent of these challenges. I hope to show some practical ways that the world can come to grips with extreme poverty, environmental stress and far-reaching shifts in global power,” he says in the BBC press release.