Join Professor Jeffrey Ashe and renowned journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson on November 13 from 1-2 pm in IAB Rm 1302 for a conversation about their respective books, and what went wrong with microfinance & how it can be changed.

“We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky“: What happened? Did microfinance take a wrong turn, or was it flawed from the beginning? Mara Kardas-Nelson’s We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Their narratives, woven through a deep history of modern international development, are set against the rise of Yunus’s vision that tiny loans would “put poverty in museums.” Kardas-Nelson asks: What is missed with a single, financially focused solution to global inequity that ignores the real drivers of poverty? Who stands to benefit and, more important, who gets left behind?

“Backyard Bankers: Immigrants, Savings Clubs and the Pursuit of the American Dream“: The essence of money?  A quarter of a billion immigrants living in rich countries mobilize and distribute over a half trillion dollars a year in savings circles that they organize and manage themselves. These groups are based on savings traditions honed over generations that have enabled their home villages to build up the reserve of capital that helped them survive. In rich countries immigrants use the savings mobilized in their groups at the lowest level to survive. All this occurs outside the institutional financial system – banks, even credit unions, or government sponsored enterprise development programs – and is based on disciplined savings, mutual accountability, and trust within a context of strong families and unified communities.

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