Goal and Rationale
The Financial Resilience program seeks to promote understanding of financial resilience – the ability of a household or community to prevent, sustain, or recover from financial shocks – in marginalized populations in high-risk/high-stress environments. In particular, we seek to explore how communications technology and externally driven microfinance interventions influence household resilience.
The field of microfinance is bursting with pioneering products, services, and breakthrough technologies, yet the industry still lacks hard evidence about the impact of these innovations. The FiRe program is a direct response to this need. We seek to conduct a series of rigorous impact assessments and identify specific measures of service effectiveness. We believe that better understanding of interventions and the market will enable providers to better serve unbanked and underbanked populations.
Background
In 2007-8, Tufts/FIC conducted a literature review of financial resilience and preliminary field studies in Haiti, Sudan, and Ethiopia. We found that suppliers of financial services and technologies operate on several assumptions: increased access to credit, savings services, and insurance improves a household’s ability to increase assets; increased assets alone lead to financial resilience; improved technologies help bring quality financial services to previously underserved populations.
However, there is almost no empirical research that tests these assumptions. We lack evidence that increased access to financial services increases the assets of marginalized households. A microcredit loan can increase assets but also increase household debt; increased savings could simply substitute for other important, perhaps more secure, household assets. Nor do we know if increased assets lead to increased net worth (assets minus liabilities), our indicator of financial resilience. In order to understand the true impact of financial interventions on household resilience, we need a firmer base of evidence.
Outputs
Publications
- Savings and Chance
Savings and Chance, a study by a team from the Center for Emerging Market Enterprises (CEME) at the Fletcher School at Tufts University explores the ubiquity of gambling practices in Haiti and their implication for financial services. As findings indicate, the Haitian lottery, known as the borlette, appears as a historical and cultural response to economic and social marginalization, as well as a manifestation of undeterred hope for a transformational lump sum, a sum large enough to allow them to escape their current circumstances.
Impact
This project is identifying a range of interventions that have succeeses in supporting financial resilience as part of our wider Disaster Risk Reduction program.