What Kenya can teach its neighbors — and the US — about improving the lives of the “unbanked”
Mobile money isn’t the one easy fix to global poverty — there’s no such thing — but it is an extraordinarily simple tool that works remarkably well. And yet, a decade after it first took off, it remains in many places underutilized. The evidence base for it is significantly stronger than the evidence base for popular financial access interventions like microloans. And there’s a great deal the global development community could do to make it more possible in the countries where it hasn’t taken off, from helping governments develop fair and limited regulation and taxation frameworks to directly dispersing money to people through mobile money systems. That sort of work isn’t flashy, but it lays the groundwork for a world where everyone can save, send, and spend money from their phones — and that, the evidence suggests, can make a really big difference.
Libra’s Long Road From a Facebook Lab to the Global Stage: A Timeline
This Coindesk article provides a detailed timeline of the Libra project’s history, from the early signs that Mark Zuckerberg’s social network was sniffing around the blockchain industry to Libra’s recent watering-down of its once-bold plans. Bookmark this article, because Coindesk will keep updating it as the story continues to unfold.
Posted from Diigo: https://www.diigo.com/user/kiffmeister/Fintech
