Weekly Links — Impacts of Financial Inclusion, Humanitarian Futures, Education Research + more

A roundup of what we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week.

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+Do Financial Inclusion Efforts Really Have an Impact on Poverty?

A new piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review challenges how we currently measure impact of financial inclusion.

“Financial Diaries studies — ethnographic research that tracks the daily cash flows of low-income households with fortnightly interviews over a year — have found that each household tends to have between 10–20 distinct financial devices in their portfolio, each of which have multiple use cases leading to multiple impact pathways. Add it all up, and we can measure a lot of impact pathways finance could be powering, including improved livelihoods, greater resilience, better housing, safer water, improved health and education, and more clean energy.”

+Beyond Survival Kits: Humanitarian Aid Is Going Wireless, Communal, And Autonomous.

The IFRC launched an exhibit, a ‘futures’ exercise if you will, imagining the state of humanitarian aid in 2030. Interesting to see these ideas visualized and thought-out. They ask some important questions like: “Do citizens want to respond to humanitarian events independent of large aid organizations or governments? In a more globalized world, are the needs of the citizens impacted by disaster more complex? Do they no longer fit the traditional approaches and assumptions that aid organizations tend to operate in?”

+What’s new in education research? Impact evaluations and measurement — January 2018 round-up.

From the Development Impact, World Bank blog, a round-up of recent research on education in low- and middle-income countries

+China emerges as a serious player in humanitarian aid.

“China is becoming a bigger player in humanitarian aid and emergency relief, but it is still not entirely clear how much this engagement is growing, and how it is driving its work forward.”

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+Rohingya who fled ethnic cleansing face effects of trauma.

From PBS NewsHour, a look into the trauma the Rohingya people have experienced and the mental health toll of displacement.

We throw around think pieces, podcasts, research, and news in our Slack channels, and we wanted to open up the conversation to our readers as well. Please note that anything we post here is not an endorsement, we just hope these weekly digests will give you something to chew on over the weekend.

We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to start a discussion below, or reach out to us on Twitter or email us at airbel@rescue.org.