IMTFI's Call for Proposals for Research 2013-2014

IMTFI's Call for Proposals for Research 2013-2014

The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine is soliciting proposals for original scholarly research on mobile money services and platforms, the harnessing of new and existing social and technological infrastructures to promote savings and other forms of value storage and the facilitation of payments at scale for poor people in the developing world. How is mobile money, as a hardware and software architecture, serving as a foundation for new services and functions? Or, how does it have the potential to do so?

For this call, IMTFI is most keenly interested in the following broad topics:

• cash and cashlessness
• mobile money as a distribution channel for other services, and other product distribution channels as a gateway or opportunity space for mobile money
• mobile technologies for payments (at the point of sale and/or remotely)
• data, privacy and the new information ecosystem being developed around mobile money
• tradeoffs between store of value and medium of exchange capability
• regulatory and policy innovations for mobile money
• interoperability
• the connection between mobile money and other infrastructures and systems (government and private entities, utilities and networked distribution channels, etc.)
• gender, development and mobile finances
• market failures in electronic or mobile payments, the misuses of mobile services (e.g. in ways that disrupt rather than improve people's lives, from fraud to use for frivolous or destructive purposes)

Eligibility: This call for proposals is open to all researchers who work in the developing world. Previous recipients are welcome to apply but new applicants will receive priority. For this call, proposals to design or implement a service or product are ineligible. We will consider research proposals only.

Deadline for submission: November 26, 2012. Decisions will be announced by early March 2013.

• Click here for DETAILED PROPOSAL FORMAT AND GUIDELINES
• Budget Forms in Word

Further Details