Well it appears as if last week was “conference week” here at NextBillion, so it’s my turn to dish on my recent attendee experience. Ready? Here I go.

I was fortunate enough to attend 'Financial Inclusion, Innovation, and Investments,' a symposium organized by the Emerging Markets Program of the Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. In a happy bit of serendipity, a professor with whom I had corresponded informed me about the event just in time for me to change my itinerary. (I had planned to be in Ithaca the week before.)

If I were to summarize the proceedings in three sentences or less, I would say that the “financial inclusion” portion of the program fostered a discussion of research regarding “the role of foreign capital in local financial development,” the scaling of micro-finance efforts, defining critical issues for African firms, and mitigating risk in financial markets. The “innovation segment” addressed the effectiveness of agricultural biotechnology in alleviating hunger and poverty. Finally, the “investments” portion of the program covered foreign direct investment (FDI) as a mechanism for growth, the role of FDI at a microeconomic level, and the state of FDI in Africa.

Admittedly, much of the material was a bit over my head. After all, I was sitting in a room full of economists, agronomists, plant geneticists, and many other impressive-sounding “-ists.” Nonetheless, I gleaned a number of interesting tidbits, and made a few “big picture” observations.

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