The 2013 SEEP
Annual Conference
will take place
November 4-7, 2013
SEEP would like to thank Citi as a sponsor of the 2013 Conference
We look forward to welcoming you to the 2013 SEEP Annual Conference
Sheraton Pentagon City Hotel
November 4-7, 2013!
If you have questions about the conference, please contact us!
Workshops and Technical Tracks
Considerable numbers of development practitioners are seeking new ways to assist extremely poor people to improve their living conditions. They have seen that economic strengthening approaches often fail to help the “ultra poor”. Unlike the moderately poor, the ultra poor typically are unable to meet their basic needs and are too vulnerable to participate in markets. In this context, the ultra poor are defined as those living on $1.25 per day or less. They have very limited physical, human, and financial assets and social networks to draw on to mobilize and leverage household and community resources or external assistance. Ultra poor households face many deficits and therefore require not only adapted financial services and market development programs, but also improved access to social safety nets, human services, and specific asset building pathways. There is growing understanding that helping ultra poor households to move out of poverty requires a multi-disciplinary approach that coordinates the delivery of an array of financial, market development and human services that can jointly address the myriad constraints they face.
Click on the circle to learn more about each workshop selected for this track.
This track is sponsored by Citi.
Over 2 billion people who live on less than $2 a day lack access to safe and affordable savings services. While debates continue about the impact of microfinance on poverty reduction, it is widely accepted that access to savings services is an important survival tool for the poor. Savings can help smooth incomes, deal with emergencies, accumulate lump sums to pay for life cycle events, and take advantage of economic opportunities as they arise. As such, savings is a critical asset for the poor – young and old alike – and an important ‘on ramp’ to financial inclusion and support enterprise development. During the past decade, there have been numerous efforts to bring savings products and services targeted to the poor to the market through a variety of providers, delivery channels, and marketing strategies. However, there continue to be a number of barriers that hinder the broad expansion of services that are cost effective, sustainable and scalable.
Click on the circle to learn more about each workshop selected for this track.
This track is sponsored by MasterCard International Incorporated. 
The number of mobile subscribers in Africa grew from 25 million in 2001 to nearly 650 million in 2011, and it is expected to reach 925 million by 2015. An estimated 1.7 billion of the world’s poor possess a mobile phone. Mobile communications and the rapid advances in digital payment systems are creating opportunities to connect poor households to affordable financial tools as well as to dramatically increase their access to information vital to health, agriculture, and enterprise development. The potential of information and communication technology to help move the poor from cash-based financial transactions into electronic form is enormous. Electronic payment technologies (such as mobile phones, smart cards, ATMs, etc.) offer a more effective, efficient, transparent, and often safer means of transacting. Innovations of this nature have the potential to create economy-wide efficiencies that can directly address the barriers to market inclusion for the poor.
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Continuously changing on the ground realities mean that for economic development interventions to achieve results, organizations must constantly learn and adapt based on evidence. However, rigorous impact results usually take years to generate and are generally not available until the end of the project cycle, too late to make mid-project course corrections or innovations. For practitioners to effectively identify which interventions are promising and could be taken to scale, it is critical to focus on collecting and utilizing existing evidence in both the design and implementation stages. By effectively incorporating evidence on what is working and what is not, efforts to invest in innovation can be tempered so that failures can be modified or abandoned and potentially transformative approaches can be further refined and scaled.
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Market facilitation techniques to develop market systems and strengthen value chains have become increasingly integrated into economic and private sector programming. With a focus on targeting benefits to the poor, practitioners continue to test and adapt enterprise development and value chain development strategies to create economic environments conducive to the increased participation of the poor or to strengthen systems in which many of the poor are already operating. Practitioners have put theory and frameworks to practice, and are discovering design, implementation, and assessment realities that are critical considerations in moving this area of practice forward and identifying gaps that still need to be addressed.
Click on the circle to learn more about each workshop selected for this track.
