| Matt Griffith |
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 Matt's work at EVI covers a wide range of activities centered on sustainable enterprise development and livelihood security. His primary tasks include: leading desk and field research into market opportunities for marginalized populations, especially youth; designing and delivering trainings to local partners worldwide; and articulating EVI's experiences and insights for various knowledge and learning platforms.Currently, Matt is leading an initiative at EVI to link savings, credit, and other capital-accumulating mechanisms to entrepreneurship and enterprise development programs. Matt has extensive experience with small enterprise development and youth livelihoods. He recently spent several months designing and conducting an impact evaluation of a microenterprise promotion program in the pastoralist regions of Ethiopia. While interviewing members of community savings groups about the various challenges of launching and maintaining microenterprises on the rangeland, Matt developed a strong interest in small enterprise development in resource-constrained environments. That interest led to a research project, commissioned by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) within USAID, focusing on the factors that influence how successfully households recover financially after a natural disaster or hazard event. That study, Increasing the Financial Resilience of Disaster-affected Populations, was recently published by the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University. Matt also has several years of experience working directly with marginalized youth in a variety of contexts. For over a year, Matt was the only field-based program officer for a new program to bring English language as a livelihood asset to provincial Russian orphans, conducting after-school English classes for 35 children and youth. After returning from Russia, Matt continued his involvement with youth as a General Education Development (GED) instructor in Brooklyn, NY. For three years, he designed and taught classes to meet the basic education and skills requirements of out-of-school youth and adults. He also identified a pressing need for better financial literacy. In response, he independently designed and implemented a multi-faceted financial education program, including teaching classes, establishing a resource library, and conducting financial education workshops for teachers and instructors from across New York City. Matt is the author of several reports and publications. In addition to the study on financial resilience, Matt has written articles on the livelihoods of East African pastoralists and the role of savings groups in resource-constrained environments. He is also the co-editor of a new book on savings-led microfinance, Financial Promise for the Poor: How Groups Build Microsavings, due for release in the summer of 2010. Matt holds a MA in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a BA in English from Washington University in St. Louis. Increasing the Financial Resilience of Disaster-affected Populations Financial Promise for the Poor: How Groups Build Microsavings |
