Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in “innovative” ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers’ moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.