Scratch the previous post– for my Doing Good final, I was put into a group to research a project on finance. Having long been a Bitcoin skeptic (the price going up does little to convince me) and unsure of what innovations one should try ahead of more data from GiveDirectly, I still gave researching the topic a great deal of effort. Still, though, listening to hours of podcasts and reading many articles did little to inspire me on the subject. When we convened our meeting on Monday, my group had very little direction.

Many suggestions were made. I suggested encouraging the death of the dowry, but that was turned down as it’s more a cultural issue than financial. Shivanku wanted refugees to be able to access their money from their home countries, but I rejected this– from all my readings on refugees from Syria and Yemen and other similar crises, these refugees either already have means of cash transfer or don’t have any money to transfer. Ariana wondered how to integrate banking more into a person’s usual routine, or perhaps how to educate westerners on poverty in the third world.

When Jaycee arrived later, we coalesced into two factions: Shivanku and Ariana wanted to research cash transfers, whereas Jaycee and I would look at financial education. This would be a closer topic to my menstruation. RIP. Period.

  1. What’s the big problem? Two billion people in the world are unbanked. 2) What’s a focus of that? We can look at the specific issue of financial education– people who are unbanked may not know why that is a problem. 3) What’s some fanciful future tech that could be applied? We can use gamification and SMS to teach bite sized lessons on financial literacy. 4) 3-5 research links: