MARK SCHREINER, PhD, is a Senior Scholar with the Center for Social Development and the Director of Microfinance Risk Management. He works to develop ways to help the poor to build assets through improved access to formal financial services provided by sustainable organizations. He pioneered credit-risk scoring in microfinance, and he developed the Simple Poverty Scorecard™, a low-cost, transparent way to measure poverty that is applied to millions of households each year across about 60 countries. With Michael Sherraden, Dr. Schreiner wrote Can the Poor Save?, and he has more than 40 articles in academic journals.
Projects
American Dream Policy Demonstration (ADD)
Asset Building
This is the first large-scale demonstration of Individual Development Accounts, with approximately 2,400 accounts opened at 13 sites across the country.
SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK)
Asset Building
The SEED OK experiment, which began in 2007, is a large-scale policy test of universal, automatic, and progressive Child Development Accounts. The CDA uses the Oklahoma 529 College Savings Plan platform.
Microfinance
Global Asset Building
We focused on credit scoring for microfinance and poverty scoring to improve access for the poor to formal financial services.
YouthSave
Global Asset Building
This initiative in Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal was to understand conditions for delivery of savings products and services to improve the lives of low-income youth.