by Brett Matthews | Mar 16, 2017 | Design, Microfinance, Numeracy, Orality, Technology
“Make memory unnecessary: put the required information in the world.” Don Norman. The Design of Everyday Things Background In 2012, on the invitation of Stuart Rutherford, a wise mentor I was fortunate to meet early in my career, I visited the rural SafeSave...
by Brett Matthews | Feb 13, 2017 | Design, Microfinance, Numeracy, Orality, Uncategorized
Building on research in Oral information management tools (2014), My Oral Village announces the publication of new research into oral cognitive capabilities and practices as they affect financial inclusion. The paper, entitled Oral financial numeracy: a hypothesis and...
by Brett Matthews | Dec 15, 2016 | Uncategorized
Oral Financial Numeracy in Tanzania: An Exploratory Study is a vital milestone for My Oral Village in our fight for global financial inclusion. Financial practitioners have long assumed that even illiterate people can read and use numeric information....
by Brett Matthews | Mar 24, 2016 | Uncategorized
As part of a larger study of oral financial numeracy, My Oral Village conducted a study of numeracy among 80 illiterate adults, mostly female users of financial services, in Cambodia and Tanzania in 2015. This 5-page Briefing Note summarizes the results of the study,...
by Brett Matthews | Mar 24, 2016 | Uncategorized
In collaboration with a management engineering team from the University of Waterloo, My Oral Village has completed a financial numeracy app designed for use by savings groups. The first version, based on field research in Tanzania, is ideally adapted for use in East...
by Brett Matthews | Dec 24, 2015 | Uncategorized
The mobile payment movement has made it easier for millions of people to send money to their family, friends and business partners world-wide. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we transfer funds, whether we migrate from there to cryptocurrencies and the...
by Brett Matthews | Nov 27, 2015 | Uncategorized
Take a taxi in almost any city in the developing world, and you will encounter oral culture. If the driver can’t find your aunt’s house, he will ask along the way. He’ll stop to talk to street-side vendors, rickshaw or motorbike drivers waiting for fares, and...
by Brett Matthews | Sep 13, 2015 | Uncategorized
“Because there is no culture-free behavior, there can be no culture-free competence.”[1] — John W. Berry Oral information management (OIM) tools and solutions are intended to enable transactions and clear markets in a situation where that has proved remarkably...
by Brett Matthews | Aug 15, 2015 | Design, Microfinance, Numeracy, Orality, Technology
Earlier this year The Economist proclaimed the coming “Planet of the Phones.” Predicting that “by 2020 80% of adults will have a supercomputer in their pocket,” it added that smartphone ownership could bring large populations into the financial systems of developing...
by Brett Matthews | Aug 4, 2015 | Uncategorized
There has been much discussion recently about the ‘over-the-counter’ (OTC) practices that are subverting financial inclusion in many developing countries (see for example this recent talk between Graham Wright and Dr. Pawan Bakhshi and this 2013 blog on mobile money...