This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in “innovative” ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers’ moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.

Anke Schwittay and Paul Braund explore the curious intersection between international aid and design.

This article introduces financial inclusion as a global assemblage of subjects, technics, and rationalities that aim to develop poor-appropriate financial products and services. Microfinance forms the foundation, but also the boundary of the assemblage, which is premised on the assumption that the 2.7 billion poor people in the world who do not currently have access to formal loan, savings, and insurance products are in need of such offerings. The work of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, with its emphasis on ethnographic research into culturally grounded monetary practices and logics, is presented as an alternative to the quantitative, economic, and financial logics that drive the assemblage.

There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) can scale their operations, reach and impact. This article takes a systemic and socio-technical approach to analyse the successful scaling of a crowdfunding social enterprise. It traces the growth of the ‘innofusion’ network of the world's first person-to-person microlending platform, with particular emphasis on practices of balancing along three dimensions: (1) the need for standardization to manage expansion across highly diverse geographical contexts and for adaptation, customization and diversification to produce locally meaningful impact; (2) online and offline strategies and (3) business and social aspects of the organization. Processes of techno-financial scaling made possible by organizational and technological innovation at the social enterprise, which is embedded in the San Francisco Bay Area's techno-entrepreneurial milieu, also enabled financial innovation among platform partners in developing countries.