Global Change Requires Local Leadership
April 11, 2022 | < 1 Minute ReadBuilding sustainable development solutions with local communities’ experience and knowledge at their foundations.
This post originally appeared in Foreign Policy’s April Issue.
Mert Tangonan was stuck. It was 2017, and Tangonan, a native of the Philippines, wanted to persuade the country’s largest banks to accept digital payments. With 99% of the transactions conducted in cash or checks across the nation’s 7,000 islands, the banks had little incentive to dive into the digital world.
Tangonan at the time served as a chief of party for Chemonics, an international development firm that hired him to lead USAID’s E-PESO Activity in the Philippines. Tapping into Chemonics’ lessons from similar projects and his deep knowledge of the Philippine banking sector, Tangonan refocused his efforts on recruiting small- and medium-sized banks, creating a critical mass of users that the larger banks could not ignore.
It worked. Now, more than 50 percent of the population uses e-commerce…Read the full story on Foreign Policy’s website here
Posts on the blog represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Chemonics.
