We’re just over midway through the hazy days of summer vacation, and children without access to high quality enrichment opportunities are already slipping behind their wealthier peers. As noted in a recent New York Times article, in addition to the decrease in math proficiency that most kids experience over the break, low-income children also lose more than two months of reading skills—skills they don’t regain during the school year. This compounds the already deep educational disparities found among students of different socioeconomic groups, which can be observed as early as 18 months of age.

Most efforts to address these gaps focus on improving our K-12 educational systems. Yet, children spend an average of 80 percent of their waking time outside of a classroom—a simple, yet startling statistic that highlights the need to explore a broader range of solutions.

As we learned at a recent Brookings event, Urban Thinkscape, an ongoing project from developmental psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, might be one of those solutions. Drawing on findings from their research on guided play—particularly from interventions like the Ultimate Block Party and The Supermarket Study—the project embeds playful learning activities, such as games and puzzles, into public places where children routinely spend time during non-school hours. Designed by architect Itai Palti, each installation is created with specific learning goals in mind and reflects best practices in psychological research.

With a pilot led by researcher Brenna Hassinger-Das in progress in the West Philadelphia Promise Zone, the project is already revealing important lessons—not only for educators, but for urban planners and policymakers as well.

The first involves the (often under-appreciated) need to work with local residents. Through meetings and focus groups with leaders of community organizations, neighbors, and Promise Zone stakeholders, the team gained a clearer understanding of resident needs, spurred interest in the project, identified potential sites, and improved designs. Residents were brought into the process early, empowered to offer suggestions at several stages, and will continue to be engaged as the project is implemented and assessed.

The upshot? When community members are meaningfully involved—and local wisdom valued—from the onset, residents become invested in the project and feel a sense of ownership of it over the long haul. This not only improves the likelihood that the project will succeed, but also helps foster neighborhood trust and cohesion, and builds social capital that can be applied to future efforts.

A second lesson is the extent to which a full scaling of the project could help transform distressed neighborhoods through what Project for Public Spaces often refers to as “lighter, quicker, cheaper” interventions.

Many high poverty urban areas are challenged with large numbers of vacant or underutilized properties, as well as dull spaces (like bus stops) that serve only utilitarian functions. The Urban Thinkscape project aims to take such spaces and remake them into opportunities for interaction and learning—and by doing so create tangible improvements to the neighborhood’s physical fabric. While the West Philadelphia pilot has substantial long-term planning behind it, ideally the “playful” installments will be refined over time so they can be more easily and cheaply implemented in other urban neighborhoods.

Finally, the Urban Thinkscape interventions have the potential to advance academic and spatial skills in children, reducing the gap in school readiness, and ultimately fostering better educational and life outcomes.

Many families in high poverty neighborhoods can’t afford extracurricular enrichment activities, particularly during the summer. And even where they might be offered—via community centers, or through other nonprofit initiatives focused on the arts, STEM activities, or sports—children may only experience them at certain times of the week. Urban Thinkscape aims to supplement these activities by embedding learning opportunities into the everyday landscape through interventions that develop numeracy, literacy, and other skills necessary to succeed in school and eventually the workforce. From an urban planning and policy perspective, this individual development is critical to helping build family wealth and vibrant, healthy city neighborhoods.

Though still nascent in its development, the Urban Thinkscape model appears to be a fun, innovative way to give children—and their caregivers—learning opportunities outside the classroom, while creating new gathering spaces and improved public places. In this way, the project is creatively employing the city itself as an agent of change. If the full vision of this work is realized, perhaps we can finally put the brakes on the “summer-slide” such that all kids can start the school year at the top of their game.

From a distance, the finger-pointing and the hand-wringing over the seeming demise of plans to build rail to Dulles Airport make it appear that the project collapsed under its own weight.

The Dulles dust-up is not a unique disease, but rather a symptom of a much larger national transportation illness. As hard as it may be to think of a $5 billion mega-transportation project as a “microcosm” of anything, right now that is exactly how one should consider the Dulles rail controversy.

The disagreements about the planned 23-mile Metrorail line through Tysons Corner in Virginia, continuing to Dulles International Airport — stalled now due to ideological differences over the appropriate federal role in transportation — are a subset of a larger battle taking place.

Around the country, metropolitan-based civic and business leaders are constructing 21st-century visions for transit, engaging local governments in true regional decision making and leveraging private funding for infrastructure projects.

Formerly auto-centric metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and Dallas have made transformative use of new investments in key transit corridors. Metropolitan Denver is embarking on arguably the most extensive transit expansion this nation has ever seen.

These regions have looked to transit to shape future growth, to provide more choices and to at least somewhat mitigate climate changes.

Unfortunately, most of this innovation is happening in spite of — rather than in conjunction with — the federal government.

The sad fact is that our national government takes an impeding and outmoded approach to transportation innovation, establishing starkly different rules that favor highways over transit projects.

This unlevel playing field has profound effects on metropolitan America and, by extension, on the economic competitiveness of the nation.

The federal program that funds new transit projects is totally discretionary and highly regulated by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Projects must prevail through an onerous review before final recommendation is made. Even then, each project is subject to the annual congressional appropriations process.

Clearly, some kind of competitive process is warranted. However, the current bureaucratic rigmarole is so torturous, it is no wonder that some metropolitan areas are forgoing the federal process completely and funding new transit segments on their own.

In addition, this administration’s inexplicably hostile approach to nonhighway projects has compounded the problem, resulting in shortsighted thinking that ignores the realities and challenges of the modern metropolis.

But no such federal gantlet governs highway projects. Simply put, the states do not have to seek federal permission to build them.

More inequity exists in terms of what the federal government is willing to contribute to investments.

Federal law created 50 years ago establishes 80 percent to 90 percent of the funding for highway projects. For transit investments, the contribution is much lower — just 47 percent, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The Dulles share is only 20 percent.

Finally, developers of federal transit projects must demonstrate a long-term ability to operate and maintain the facility.

Makes sense, right? It is one thing to create a project but, as the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis underscored, maintaining it is entirely another. Yet recipients of highway dollars amazingly are not responsible for this.

All of this brings us back to the Dulles rail project. Understandably, many feel that the Department of Transportation’s lack of clear guidance and direction, astonishing miscommunication, unprecedented heavy-handedness and traditional, road-centric thinking may be too much to overcome.

Yet the hope is that cooler heads prevail. The focus now must be on making Dulles rail a negotiated success rather than a standoff failure, because too many benefits are on the line.

The project promises to transform a congested suburban corridor, contribute toward energy independence and take advantage of a unique private finance and development partnership to accommodate decades’ worth of metropolitan growth. It also will anchor Washington’s status as an international capital.

Right now, though, our outmoded transportation infrastructure, both here and around the country, is ill-served by an outmoded federal partner.

Robert Puentes is a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

Editor's Note: This blog post is part of The Primaries Project series, where veteran political journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro, along with scholars in Governance Studies and the Campaign Finance Institute, examine the congressional primaries and ask what they reveal about the future of each political party and the future of American politics.

A great deal of attention has been paid to the existence of independent expenditure groups and to the billionaires who fund them. The Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, right wing billionaires in politics, and Tom Steyer, the newest left wing billionaire in politics, seem to have had nearly as much ink spilled on them as have the candidates and causes they endorse.  And no wonder. Americans are fascinated and worried about the question Darrell West poses in the second chapter of his new book Billionaires, “Can rich dudes buy an election?”

Tracking the sources and amounts of money in post Citizens United elections is a full time and complex job. Our hats go off to the Campaign Finance Institute who has recently completed the most extensive study ever of the role of independent expenditures in primary elections. Michael Malbin, Founding Director of the Center and author of the upcoming report on this year’s primaries, shows us just how big these groups, often funded by billionaires, have gotten.  In research focusing on independent spending in the 2014 congressional primaries, Malbin points out that in the 15 House races with the most independent expenditure money ($500,000 +) these expenditures counted for 76% as much as the candidates own campaign money. In Senate races, the independent expenditures accounted for 44% as much as the candidates own money.  Even the candidates themselves are worried about this trend since it often seems that outside groups can swamp a candidate’s own message.

Malbin also shows us why it is so hard to figure out what’s going on in an individual election. Only 49 of the 281 organizations that were around in the 2012 cycle spending money on behalf of congressional primary candidates were also around in 2014. That means that there were 232 new and different groups playing in 2014, posing challenges for the journalists and academics trying to track them.

The Campaign Finance Institute, however, has data on all these organizations from 2012 and 2014.  They have categorized them by ideology and, as the following chart shows, there are some interesting developments. For instance, while conservative independent expenditure groups remain the biggest spenders in the 2014 congressional primaries, their overall proportion of independent expenditures is down from 2012.  That year, conservative groups spent $40.5 million, nearly three quarters of total independent expenditures, compared to $9.3 million or 17 percent of total expenditures for Democrats.  In 2014, conservative groups upped their spending to $56.8 million, but their overall share of independent expenditures fell to 68% as liberal groups doubled their spending and increased their percentage of the total to 23%.

Even more surprising is the change in spending patterns within the Republican Party. As the following table shows, this really was the year when the establishment fought back. In 2012 anti-establishment spending by independent expenditure groups in congressional primaries constituted 59% of all such expenditures while spending by independent expenditure groups on behalf of establishment Republicans was only 36% of the total.  In two years, those numbers flipped.  In 2014, with control of the Senate at stake, the establishment mobilized independent expenditure groups which spent 55% of all the money spent by such groups while the anti-establishment groups spent only 37%.

There’s something for everyone in these findings. For the Democrats who have been on the defensive for much of this year but who have gotten through a primary season with few internal divisions, the increase in spending on their behalf and the sense that they will be able to run a good ground game in the key states where it really counts is a plus.

For the Republicans, the heavy spending by establishment groups has paid off in that they haven’t let weak candidates slip into the general election contest. They are probably as strong as they can be going into the fall campaign.

Nonetheless, tracking the money in this new election environment is a complex and full time job. And Darrell West’s question still hangs over us—“Can rich dudes buy an election?”

The 2015 Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) Report and Scorecard evaluates access to and usage of affordable financial services across 21 geographically and economically diverse countries.

The FDIP Report and Scorecard seek to answer a set of fundamental questions about today’s global financial inclusion efforts, including: 1) Do country commitments make a difference in progress toward financial inclusion?; 2) To what extent do mobile and other digital technologies advance financial inclusion?; and 3) What legal, policy, and regulatory approaches promote financial inclusion?

John D. Villasenor, Darrell M. West, and Robin J. Lewis analyzed the financial inclusion landscape in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, and Zambia. Countries received scores and rankings based on 33 indicators spanning four dimensions: country commitment, mobile capacity, regulatory environment, and adoption.

The authors’ analysis also provides several takeaways about how to best expand financial inclusion across the world:

• Country commitment is fundamental.
• The movement toward digital financial services will accelerate financial inclusion.
• Geography generally matters less than policy, legal, and regulatory changes, although some regional trends in terms of financial services provision are evident.
• Central banks, ministries of finance, ministries of communications, banks, nonbank financial providers, and mobile network operators play major roles in achieving greater financial inclusion.
• Full financial inclusion cannot be achieved without addressing the financial inclusion gender gap.

This year’s Report and Scorecard is the first of a series of annual reports examining financial inclusion activities around the world.

View the full report and a full compendium of the country rankings here.

Downloads

• Download the report

Editors Note: On August 23, the Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) released the 2015 Financial and Digital Inclusion Project Report and Scorecard. Brookings will hold an event and live webcast on Wednesday, August 26 to discuss the report’s findings. Follow the conversation on Twitter using #FinancialInclusion and submit comments on the report to FDIPComments@brookings.edu.

Around the world, some two billion adults lack access to an account at a formal financial institution. In order to shrink that number, many countries have made commitments to expanding financial services to the poor. These commitments include recognizing the importance of financial inclusion, developing an inclusion policy, and using data to measure progress toward inclusion goals. The Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) evaluates access to and usage of affordable financial services by underserved people across 21 countries. Of these countries, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Rwanda and Uganda were the top scorers.

The 2015 FDIP Report and Scorecard rank these countries based on four dimensions of financial inclusion: country commitment, mobile capacity, regulatory environment, and adoption of traditional and digital financial services. The findings indicate that country commitments do matter for achieving financial inclusion. Some regional trends are present, such as the relatively higher amount of money stored on mobile accounts in Africa. Mobile technology accelerates financial inclusion in places that lack legacy financial institutions. Additionally, a gender gap persists in ownership of financial accounts that could be reversed with greater access to mobile money services. The 2015 Report and Scorecard are the first in a series of publications intended to provide policymakers, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and the general public with information that can help improve financial inclusion in these countries and around the world.

 View the 2015 Brookings FDIP Report and Scorecard, watch the webcast of the live event, and send feedback on the report to FDIPcomments@brookings.edu.

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series on the Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project, which aims to measure access to and usage of financial services among individuals who have historically been disproportionately excluded from the formal financial system. To read the first annual FDIP report, learn more about the methodology, and watch the 2015 launch event, visit the 2015 Report and Scorecard webpage.

Convenient access to banking infrastructure is something many people around the world take for granted. Yet while the number of people outside the formal financial system has substantially decreased in recent years, 2 billion adults still do not have an account with a formal financial institution or mobile money provider.¹

This means that significant opportunities remain to provide access to and promote use of affordable financial services that can help people manage their financial lives more safely and efficiently.

To learn more about how countries can facilitate greater financial inclusion among underserved groups, the Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) sought to answer the following questions: (1) Do country commitments make a difference in progress toward financial inclusion?; (2) To what extent do mobile and other digital technologies advance financial inclusion; and (3) What legal, policy, and regulatory approaches promote financial inclusion?

To address these questions, the FDIP team assessed 33 indicators of financial inclusion across 21 economically, geographically, and politically diverse countries that have all made recent commitments to advancing financial inclusion. Indicators fell within four key dimensions of financial inclusion: country commitment, mobile capacity, regulatory commitment, and adoption of selected traditional and digital financial services.

In an effort to obtain the most accurate and up-to-date understanding of the financial inclusion landscape possible, the FDIP team engaged with a wide range of experts — including financial inclusion authorities in the FDIP focus countries — and also consulted international non-governmental organization publications, government documents, news sources, and supply and demand-side data sets.

Our research led to 5 overarching findings.

1. Country commitments matter.

   Not only did our 21 focus countries make commitments toward financial inclusion, but countries generally took these commitments seriously and made progress toward their goals. For example, the top five countries within the scorecard each completed at least one of their national-level financial inclusion targets. While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, our research supports findings by other financial inclusion experts that national-level country commitments are associated with greater financial inclusion progress. For example, the World Bank has noted that countries with national financial inclusion strategies have twice the average increase in the number of account holders as countries that do not have these strategies in place.

2. The movement toward digital financial services will accelerate financial inclusion.

   Digital financial services can provide customers with greater security, privacy, and convenience than transacting via traditional “brick-and-mortar” banks. We predict that digital financial services such as mobile money will become increasingly prevalent across demographics, particularly as user-friendly smartphones become cheaper² and more widespread.³

   Mobile money has already driven financial inclusion, particularly in countries where traditional banking infrastructure is limited. For example, mobile money offerings in Kenya (particularly the widely popular M-Pesa service) are credited with advancing financial inclusion: The Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database found that the percentage of adults with a formal account in Kenya increased from about 42 percent in 2011 to about 75 percent in 2014, with around 58 percent of adults in Kenya having used mobile money within the preceding 12 months as of 2014.

3. Geography generally matters less than policy, legal, and regulatory changes, although some regional trends in terms of financial services provision are evident.

   Regional trends include the widespread use of banking agents (sometimes known as correspondents)⁴ in Latin America, in which retail outlets and other third parties are able to offer some financial services on behalf of banks,⁵ and the prevalence of mobile money in sub-Saharan Africa. However, these regional trends aren’t absolute: For example, post office branches have served as popular financial access points in South Africa,⁶ and the GSMA’s “2014 State of the Industry” report found that the highest growth in the number of mobile money accounts between December 2013 and December 2014 was in Latin America. Overall, we found high-performing countries across multiple regions and using multiple approaches, demonstrating that there are diverse pathways to achieving greater financial inclusion.

4. Central banks, ministries of finance, ministries of communications, banks, non-bank financial providers, and mobile network operators have major roles in achieving greater financial inclusion. These entities should closely coordinate with respect to policy, regulatory, and technological advances.

   With the roles of public and private sector entities within the financial sector becoming increasingly intertwined, coordination across sectors is critical to developing coherent and effective policies. Countries that performed strongly on the country commitment and regulatory environment components of the FDIP Scorecard generally demonstrated close coordination among public and private sector entities that informed the emergence of an enabling regulatory framework. For example, Tanzania’s National Financial Inclusion Framework⁷ promotes competition and innovation within the financial services sector by reflecting both public and private sector voices.⁸

5. Full financial inclusion cannot be achieved without addressing the financial inclusion gender gap and accounting for diverse cultural contexts with respect to financial services.

   Persistent gender disparities in terms of access to and usage of formal financial services must be addressed in order to achieve financial inclusion. For example, Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan have demonstrated a significant gap in formal account ownership between men and women. Guardianship and inheritance laws concerning account opening and property ownership present cultural and legal barriers that contribute to this gender gap.⁹

   Understanding diverse cultural contexts is also critical to advancing financial inclusion sustainably. In the Philippines, non-bank financial service providers such as pawn shops are popular venues for accessing financial services.¹⁰ Leveraging these providers as agents can therefore be a useful way to harness trust in these systems to increase financial inclusion.

To dive deeper into the report’s findings and compare country rankings, visit the FDIP interactive. We also welcome feedback about the 2015 Report and Scorecard at FDIPComments@brookings.edu.

¹ Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Leora Klapper, Dorothe Singer, and Peter Van Oudheusden, “The Global Findex Database 2014: Measuring Financial Inclusion around the World,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 7255, April 2015, VI, http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2015/04/15/090224b082dca3aa/1_0/Rendered/PDF/The0Global0Fin0ion0around0the0world.pdf#page=3.

² Claire Scharwatt, Arunjay Katakam, Jennifer Frydrych, Alix Murphy, and Nika Naghavi, “2014 State of the Industry: Mobile Financial Services for the Unbanked,” GSMA, 2015, p. 24, http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/SOTIR_2014.pdf.

³ GSMA Intelligence, “The Mobile Economy 2015,” 2015, pgs. 13-14, http://www.gsmamobileeconomy.com/GSMA_Global_Mobile_Economy_Report_2015.pdf.

⁴ Caitlin Sanford, “Do agents improve financial inclusion? Evidence from a national survey in Brazil,” Bankable Frontier Associates, November 2013, pg. 1, http://bankablefrontier.com/wp-content/uploads/documents/BFA-Focus-Note-Do-agents-improve-financial-inclusion-Brazil.pdf.

⁵ Alliance for Financial Inclusion, “Discussion paper: Agent banking in Latin America,” 2012, pg. 3, http://www.afi-global.org/sites/default/files/discussion_paper_-_agent_banking_latin_america.pdf.

⁶ The National Treasury, South Africa and the AFI Financial Inclusion Data Working Group, “The Use of Financial Inclusion Data Country Case Study: South Africa – The Mzansi Story and Beyond,” January 2014, http://www.afi-global.org/sites/default/files/publications/the_use_of_financial_inclusion_data_country_case_study_south_africa.pdf.

⁷ Tanzania National Council for Financial Inclusion, “National Financial Inclusion Framework: A Public-Private Stakeholders’ Initiative (2014-2016),” 2013, pgs. 19-22, http://www.afi-global.org/sites/default/files/publications/tanzania-national-financial-inclusion-framework-2014-2016.pdf.

⁸ Simone di Castri and Lara Gidvani, “Enabling Mobile Money Policies in Tanzania,” GSMA, February 2014, http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Tanzania-Enabling-Mobile-Money-Policies.pdf.

⁹ Mayada El-Zoghbi, “Mind the Gap: women and Access to Finance,” Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, 13 May 2015, http://www.cgap.org/blog/mind-gap-women-and-access-finance.

¹⁰ Xavier Martin and Amarnath Samarapally, “The Philippines: Marshalling Data, Policy, and a Diverse Industry for Financial Inclusion,” FINclusion Lab by MIX, June 2014, http://finclusionlab.org/blog/philippines-marshalling-data-policy-and-diverse-industry-financial-inclusion.