Daryl Collins
Daryl Collins is co-author of Portfolios of the Poor and Managing Director at Bankable Frontier Associates. Daryl’s work focuses on linkages between understanding of low income household financial management and the business case for providing financial services. Daryl, who has extensive experience in managing financial diaries (including in Kenya, India, Mexico, South Africa), also supervised the CGAP Smallholder Diaries project. Daryl began her career as an emerging market economist at a New York investment bank before moving to South Africa in the late 1990’s. She ultimately joined the finance faculty of the University of Cape Town, where she leveraged a successful career in portfolio management into research on the financial behavior of the poor. Daryl holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. from New York University.
1 Books Written
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
by Daryl Collins
Rating: 3.9 ⭐
• 2 recommendations ❤️
Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically explain 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 often 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 possible, 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.