Join Peter Ippolito and Andrés Rico Toro from TechnoServe for the USAID Microenterprise Development office After Hours Seminar, "Effectively Catalyzing SME Growth through Business Plan Competitions: Innovative Examples from Latin America." The speakers will focus in particular on how regional efforts from El Salvador to Chile have allowed TechnoServe to continuously improve its capacity to encourage entrepreneurship and high impact SMEs.

If you have any questions about the webinar, please email us.

Currently, the United Nations estimates that there are more than 200 million migrants worldwide. According to the World Bank, migrants sent more than $325 billion in remittances to their families and friends in 2010. Because the vast majority of these remittances were sent through informal channels, the full economic impact of this substantial sum of money was never realized.

Negotiating your way out of poverty is like a life-long or even intergenerational challenge, where any small movement out of poverty can be undone by an illness in the family or a natural disaster. Many of the tools of pro-poor economic growth are meant to help prevent a family from going down, soften the blow from setbacks or even provide ways out of poverty.

Ultra-poor households, however, are usually incapable of even meeting life’s basic necessities – they lack productive assets of any kind and are too vulnerable to gainfully participate in markets.

In the upcoming After Hours Seminar #54 Fermin Vivanco, Natasha Bajuk and Maria Luisa Hayem from the Inter-American Development Bank will discuss an innovative and multi-donor approach that the Multilateral Investment Fund is taking when linking savings to government payments, including conditional cash transfers, in Latin America and the Caribbean. This approach emphasizes the role of financial intermediaries for a more effective developmental impact.