Vishnu Sridharan: All Related Content

Vishnu Sridharan, program associate of the foundation’s Global Asset Project, sat down for an email interview to discuss the findings and what role CCT could play in poverty reduction.

Original article

Though the Assets Learning Conference is now more than a week past, one session that has stuck with me dealt with The Great Recession and its Impact on Wealth in Low-Income Communities and Communities of Color. Through deftly interwoven presentations from the Urban Institute, Woodstock Institute, and Ohio State University (moderated by the U.S.

Giving cash to low-income households is a great first step to help them toward self-sufficiency and improved life outcomes. However, for some time it has been clear that those in extreme poverty need more. For these families, as stated in a recent report by BRAC Development Institute and the Mastercard Foundation, government support “only succeeds in keeping [households] afloat – managing to avoid starvation or even death.” However, “in the absence of exit strategies, such as wealthy, influential families to draw productive resources from [or] adequate economic opportunities…these extremely poor households have been unable to ascend out of their poverty.”

One of the most successful tools in the fight against poverty, one that has attracted increasing attention over the past decade, is social protection via cash transfers. In fact, the New America Foundation’s Global Savings and Social Protection Database – which focuses on Latin America, Africa, East and Asia – has identified over 90 cash-transfer programs in 45 countries, with over a half billion beneficiaries. As the Chronic Poverty Research Centre puts it, “social protection is critical in preventing descent into chronic poverty and reducing the depth of poverty...

The site's usefulness, said Vishnu Sridharan, program associate for the Global Assets Project, comes from data collected from programs across the globe. "When we bring together the data from all these programs and all these efforts and get a state-of-the-field in one place, the synergies that can take place are amazing," Sridharan added.

This past Sunday, Haitian President Michel Martelly launched Haiti’s conditional cash transfer program "Ti Manman Cheri." The program was defined as “a social protection program for families with young children in school and living in extreme poverty…[which] regularly transfers money to these families provided they fulfill the specific commitmen

This past Sunday, the World Bank partnered with the government of Mexico to host “Financial Inclusion: from Principles to Action.” In addition to a high level opening plenary with H.R.H. Princess Maxima of the Netherlands and Mexican Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade, the event included sessions on financial inclusion, the role of the private sector, financial literacy and consumer protection.

UK’s Department for International Development funds a program called “Research Into Use” (RIU) that “aims to accumulate and evaluate evidence to shape and share lessons on how best to enable innovation in the agricultural sector so as to achieve social and economic gains in diverse developing country settings.” Although much of the program’s work focuses on agricultural knowledge and innovation, some has broader applicability to 1) the use of technology in disseminating information and 2) the gap between information dissemination and innovation/behavior change. This parallels a lot of the Global Assets Project’s work on habit formation in general and promoting savings behaviors among the poor in particular.

This week the World Council of Credit Unions released its latest technical guide, “Using Mobile Technology to Expand Financial Inclusion: The Credit Union Experience,” which serves as a helpful perspective on the ways that a variety of technologies are being leveraged to expand financial inclusion. In addition to bringing attention to the important (and all-too-often underappreciated) role that Credit Unions play in banking the unbanked, the report also does a great job of illustrating how a variety of technologies are being used in coordination to further the goal of helping poor households to more safely and cheaply manage their money.

The Global Assets Project has written extensively about and convened experts to discuss the continuing gap between the hype behind the potential of mobile phones to revolutionize international development efforts and their actual impact on the ground. A new report from the World Economic Forum, “The Role of Government in Advancing Adoption of Mobile Financial Services,” highlights the prominence of this gap, though the paper’s authors see it as a powerful opportunity.

NAF's Global Savings and Social Protection initiative is excited to release its first heat-mapping of different countries' potential to implement savings-linked social protection programs. NAF has identified 51 countries around the world that have social safety net/public benefit programs that involve cash transfers. For these countries, this map shows 11 different variables relating to their payment infrastructure. A country's score of 1-5 on each variable corresponds to its relative quintile; that is to say, India's score on ATM's per 100,000 adults is a '2' because its data falls in the second quintile (between the 20th and 40th percentile). Each variable is used to compute the country's composite Payment Infrastructure rating of Low/Medium/High. Roll over or click a country to view individual indicators.