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'Financial Diaries' of the Poor

By David Lepeska on 17 June 2009

 

In 2004, Stuart Rutherford founded SafeSave, a money-management project in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The project eventually sparked “Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day,” a book published in early 2009 by Princeton University Press that was written by Rutherford, Daryl Collins, Orlanda Ruthven and Jonathan Morduch. Its “financial diaries” provide a detailed and unprecedented picture of the financial lives of the poor in Bangladesh, India and South Africa, according to Morduch, a New York University economics professor. They “helped us rethink what microfinance …could become,” Morduch says.

 

View more of our interview with Jonathan Morduch.

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David Lepeska
David has served as U.N. correspondent for the newswire UPI and reported for several major newspapers, including the New York Daily News and Newsday. He was chief correspondent for the Kashmir Observer in Srinagar, India, and regularly contributes to the Economist, among other publications. Since 2007, David has reported for Devex News from Washington, New York, as well as South Asia.

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