Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day

Amazon.com Price: $25.07 (as of 11/10/2019 07:27 PST- Details)

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Description

Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you’ve never had to live to tell the tale on an income so small, it is hard to consider. How would you put food on the table, have the funds for a home, and educate your children? How would you take care of emergencies and old age? Each day, more than a billion people around the globe should answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically give an explanation for how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems.

The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa–records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are continuously surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever imaginable, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the “bottom billion.”

Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.

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