Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty

The Opportunity:

Understanding and measuring how financial systems can be better designed to include the poor and alleviate poverty around the world is far from a small task.  Building off Robert Townsend’s Enterprise Initiative, Arete liaised between researchers, the University, and a foundation to develop and fund a large-scale research program that brought together a council of leading scholars in a Consortium and oversaw seed funding to investigate the impact of savings and financial services on poor households, macro and regulatory issues, and the impact of mobile banking in developing countries.

What we did for them:

• Collaborate with other University offices
• Facilitate research feasibility and agenda-setting workshops
• Develop integrated and holistic funding strategy
• Help funders achieve their funding visions
• Engage foundations

Principal Investigator:   Robert M. Townsend

Website: www.cfsp.org