Research

This month, the YouthSave Consortium, Expert Advisory Board (EAB) and partnering Financial Institution (FI) representatives from Project countries came together in Bogota, Colombia for a two-day learning exchange.

Recently, the Enterprise Development and Microfinance Journal (EDM),” published their ‘youth and children’ – focused December edition, featuring a piece co-authored by the Director of YouthSaveat Save the Children, Rani Deshpande and Director of the Global Assets Project at the New America Found

Recently, the initial findings from the FinScope Ghana study were released, led by Finmark Trust South Africa and conducted by Synovate, the study was commissioned by Ghana’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and funded by the World Bank and DFID (UK Department for International Development).

SEED (Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment), is an initiative designed to “test the efficacy of and inform policy for a national system of savings and asset-building accounts for children and youth.” Recently SEED National Partners published their findings from a 10-year study on Child Development Accounts (CDA), linking them to long-term asset building and economic security.

Today, there are 515 million youth living on less than two dollars per day. Mindful of the world’s most vulnerable population growing in numbers,Making Cents International (MCI) gathered NGOs, financial institutions, and researchers from around the world at the Global Youth Enterprise and Livelihoods Development Conference to discuss potential solutions for their development; among them, youth savings accounts (YSAs).

A colleague of mine just sent me this article about the particular challenges faced by the clergy in retirement. It seems that while we may see preachers and ministers as "wise and frugal," and therefore assume they're responsibly saving away for old age, many are in fact in more trouble than their secular counterparts.

Last month I attended the 2010 Family Financial Security Symposium, the inaugural event of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Summarizing the papers presented and paraphrasing the impressive panelists is too tall an order, so below, I wanted to highlight some key findings from select presentations and make a few general observations.

The California Asset Building Program released a report on the federal Earned Income Tax Credit’s impact on the California economy yesterday in Sacramento, and let’s just say that these bucks have a lot of bang.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the federal government’s largest resources for working low-income Americans. It is widely regarded as the nation’s most effective and efficient anti-poverty program and has been expanded by a series of Democratic and Republican presidents. Hundreds of thousands of Californians, however, fail to claim EITC refunds, which range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. The families and individuals who miss out are not the only losers when these refunds go unclaimed. Local economies never benefit from this money.

At some point, most people who spend time around young children encounter a youngster who likes to play the “Why?” game. For those who are not familiar with the “Why?” game, a child asks a question and an adult answers, to which the child asks a second question: Why?

The adult explains the answer and gets the question again: Why?

For a long time, researchers believed that most questions young children ask were being asked in order to prolong a conversation, and not because the child wanted an actual explanation about something. Why? The belief was that children don’t have an understanding of causality until they are between 5 and 8 years old; meaning that they don’t see how one thing can happen or exist because of something else. However, as research continues to dig deeper into the minds of young children, many researchers are starting to believe that very young children—possibly infants—can make causal inferences about the relationship between objects in their environment.