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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, Surveys Gone Bad – When “Yes” means “No”, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 2 days, 23 hours ago
… or, A Story of How a Coding C*Screw-Up Made Bangladesh One of the Least Tolerant Countries in the World. (Spoiler: It isn’t!)
What We Thought We Knew
Yesterday, the Washington Post put out a story, A […] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, Living with Glorified Correlations from “Big Data”, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 3 weeks, 6 days ago
A little while back, we realized we were nipping at the heels of “big data” territory, arriving at near 1 terabytes of data. We being the team at Bankable Frontier Associates I work with, through a partnership […] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, D.Net’s Info-Ladies, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Although most of my work is with microfinance institutions, I have the good fortune to catch up with great institutions doing quite innovative work every now and then. D.Net is one such institution, who I interned […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, US Financial Diaries, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 3 months ago
There’s poverty everywhere …
We’ve spent a fair bit of time talking about various methods to study poverty and development in this blog, ranging from plain vanilla surveys to financial diaries, RCTs and […] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, P9: But I Only Want To Save!, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 4 months ago
Saving in a Lending-to-save Product
We know that folks who have to deal with incomes that are low, irregular and uncertain have to resort adapting available financial instruments to meet their idiosyncratic […] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, Microfinance and Its Discontents – A Mini-Review, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 4 months, 1 week ago
I finally got my hands on Lamia Karim’s Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, and it made for a great read. If you are interested in this field, you should check it out. I thoroughly […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, 4 Stages to Digital Inclusion, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 5 months ago
The concept of financial inclusion has been around for a while, and digital approaches to furthering financial inclusion has received a lot of attention because it is a potentially relatively low cost way to bring […] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, Lamia Karim Talk on “Microfinance and Its Discontents”, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 5 months, 2 weeks ago
Who knew dissertation proposals took so long to pump out … Will blame the lull in blogging on that, though there’s been a lot going on in the background that I’d love to share “soon” on the blog.
In the […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, MicroSave naturally experimenting in AP, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 8 months, 2 weeks ago
Natural experiments are great for the social sciences, and has been exceedingly rare for microfinance. Then the AP crisis came along, and caused the kind of change in circumstances that make for just such an […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, A Study of Limitations of a Study on Limitations, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 8 months, 2 weeks ago
A friend of mine recently forwarded me a recent publication titled The Limitations of Microcredit for Promoting Microenterprises in Bangladesh that appeared in the Jan-Mar 2012 edition of the Economic Annals. I […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, What Does a Mattress, a Savings Club and a Cow Have In Common?, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 8 months, 2 weeks ago
Why, you can save through all of them, of course!That was a key part of the intuition that gave rise to the three savings types outlined in BFA’s InFocus Note #3: Combining demand and supply side insights to […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, An InFocus Inquiry Into Low Income Savers, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 9 months, 4 weeks ago
If more data is better than less, what could better than having access to … all the data?
Since around the beginning of the year, I’ve been researching it up with Bankable Frontier Associates, focusing on low […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, Microfinance Banana Skins, v4.0, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 9 months, 4 weeks ago
Microfinance Banana Skins 2012 is out! As always, it’s a good read, and gives one a sense of the shifting perceptions of risks in the microfinance industry.We have a new entrant at #1 this year – […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, The “who uses it” and “how much does it cost” of P9, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 9 months, 4 weeks ago
I found some pretty nifty Python code online that allows one to calculate Excel-like XIRR, and used the publicly available P9 data as meat for the grinder. This post shares the goodies that came out through the […] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new post, Back from hiatus!, on the site CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog 11 months, 3 weeks ago
The CEME Inclusive Commerce Blog went dormant about a year ago. Graduations, comprehensive exams, various life-altering events – you know how it goes. But, we’re back, and hopefully will have more posts on more […]
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Ashirul Amin wrote a new blog post: Skinning the APR Cat 2 years, 3 months ago
How important are compulsory deposits, insurance, etc. to calculating Annual Percentage Rates (APRs)? I played around some more with the MFTransparency dataset on India I wrote my last post on to answer this question, and it seems the answer is, “it depends”. The Pricing Data Report looks at APR including deposits and APR including insurance,…[Read more] -
Ashirul Amin wrote a new blog post: India Transparent Pricing Initiative, MFTransparency 2 years, 3 months ago
MFTransparency does some awesome work surrounding pricing transparency of micro-loans . One of their latest initiatives involved pricing microfinance loans in India. The report is available here, and you can play around with the data they collected using a pretty nifty dashboard-like tool here. Transparency Why? Transparent pricing is necessary…[Read more]