Over the last three decades, the world has witnessed unprecedented expansion of access to financial services for the underserved. EPoD’s five-day program, Rethinking Financial Inclusion, offered in collaboration with HKS Executive Education, examines the ways broader financial access can foster entrepreneurship, reduce poverty, and improve the well-being in developing countries.

2018 marks the fifth year EPoD has offered Rethinking Financial Inclusion. The program will bring 47 participants from 26 different countries to HKS on October 14-19. They will attend lectures by Harvard faculty on key topics and skills for innovation in financial inclusion, as well as work in teams to apply EPoD’s Smart Policy Design and Implementation (SPDI) framework to pressing problems faced in their current work. 

This year’s instructors will be Asim Khwaja, Rohini Pande and Charity Troyer Moore. Guest speakers will include Hannah Riley Bowles, Shawn Cole, and Brigitte Madrian. Click below to read articles from EPoD’s series on the NextBillion financial inclusion blog, describing some of the innovations that the course has covered in the past.  

Big Data isn’t Enough: We Need an ‘All of the Above’ Strategy to Drive Innovation in Financial Inclusion

What Stands Between Women and Full Financial Inclusion?

The Surprising Reason Why Savings Boosts Income – New Research Reveals an Unexpected Benefit of Financial Inclusion

The Hard Facts on ‘Soft Data’: Determining Risk for Loan Applicants Without Credit Scores is More than a Numbers Game

The (Financial) Wisdom of the Crowd: How a Group of Non-experts Outperformed Traditional Credit Ratings at Identifying Good and Bad Borrowers