A New Way to Answer the Global Call for Better Data on Savings for the Poor: SPINNAKER Economic Opportunities

“We need data. We need to have a way to know what is working and what is not. There are no common indicators. There are no benchmarks for success. There are no systems in place to help us with this.”

I listened attentively as my colleague and friend, Ben Shell, Senior Associate for New Product Development at Women’s World Banking outlined what he sees as one of the greatest roadblocks to developing, understanding and evaluating savings products for low-income youth at the Youth Financial Services Expert Working Group meeting held at the onset of this year’s Global Youth Economic Opportunity Conference, hosted by Making Cents International. Cited within this expert group as one of the top three challenges to product implementation in the field, lack of data and information around what works and doesn’t and for whom is an unfortunate and inescapable truth in the child and youth financial services field, where currently a ton of hope rests on a grain of evidence.

But these frustrations and inescapable truths are not unique to the YFS field in the slightest: I’ve heard variations on Ben’s complaint dozens of times before. The dearth of data on savings services for the poor is the core motivation for creating the SPINNAKER Network (Savings for the Poor Innovation and Knowledge Network) at the New America Foundation. In the fall of 2010, the Financial Services for the Poor team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contracted the Global Assets Project to explore ways to facilitate the creation of a global knowledge and data bank on savings products for the poor. Our goal over the last year has been to work with folks like Ben and others at Women’s World Banking, with CGAP, MicroSave, the Mix Market and many, many others to understand the data needs that would help this growing field work more effectively and innovate more quickly in our collective effort to achieve full, effective financial inclusion for the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Part of that effort has been to experiment with site development based on their feedback, and while we’re nowhere close to providing comprehensive datasets, standards, or benchmarks a la Ben’s idea, we have made some strides in mapping out savings products around the world, identifying unique and defining features and building in data visualizations and product comparisons that we hope can be used for market research and analysis. We have created a community page to host analysis, commentary and other insights from our partners, as well as a resources page (created with CGAP and WWB) to highlight our picks for the most useful background information on understanding and/or developing savings services for the poor.

Our goal is to continue to work with the field to refine and facilitate the data collection survey and methods and to create a site that consistently adds value to a fast-growing and changing field of bankers, practitioners, policymakers, researchers and thinkers.

We invite you to review the public alpha version of our site and provide us with your comments, feedback, data or resources to help get us closer to solving the data gap and removing one more hurdle to savings services for the poor. SPINNAKER is at the beginning of a long journey and it’s the work and energy of an entire community of people that keeps the wind in our sails.