Monday, January 11, 2016

Saving for a rainy day – in alternative ways: part 1

Research by IMTFI fellow Janet Arnado featured in The Guardian Visa Partner Zone

Filipino pesos like these are likely to be stored in unusual places around a home or invested in community festivals and family celebrations. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

"According to the World Bank Global Findex database, while most adults save money, few use a bank or other formal institution to do so. This two-part report looks alternate savings methods – using unusual hiding places or recirculating funds within the community.

Can you gather $2500 in the next month for an emergency? If so, how would you finance it? Researchers at Gallup and the World Bank posed this question to about 150,000 adults in more than 140 countries as part of the 2014 World Bank Global Findex database – and found intriguing results.

Leora Klapper, lead economist at the Development Research Group, World Bank, says that three-quarters of those surveyed said they could come up with money, a higher number than she expected. And more than 30%, even those who squirrel away funds without formal bank accounts, said they’d use their savings to come up with the cash...

IMTFI fellow Janet Arnado, a Philippines-based sociologist with the Research Institute for Gender and Women Inc, found that because poor Filipino women living in the hinterland are far from a town and without transportation, few of them have bank accounts. 'So,' Arnado notes, 'they store coins in visible places like Coca-Cola bottles or short bamboo poles. They conceal more lucrative bills in clothing and pillows. They creatively protect their money in order to deceive thieves as well as their husbands while increasing their bargaining power within the household.'"

The piece also notes IMTFI's involvement in research where "women and men who lack access to formal banking channels frequently develop savings methods that work within their communities, even if financial experts view them as risky."


Mary Janet Arnado, PhD  is the founding president and CEO of Research Institute for Gender and Women, Inc. In 2010 as a research fellow at IMTFI she undertook her research titled, "Gender and Money: Case Studies from Philippine Indigenous Communities." Find more about her work and the project here.

Stay tuned for more featured IMTFI research in part 2, coming this week!



No comments:

Post a Comment