On Tuesday, July 25, the Maker Hub and the Gelardin New Media Center are hosting a special afternoon of conversation, socailizing , and workshops with the UN Development Programme's Alternative Finance Lab from UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub in Lauinger Library. The afternoon will begin at 2:00pm with a presentation by members of the AltFin Lab in the Murray Room (5th Floor, Lauinger Library). The AltFin Lab is an internal startup, run out of UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub for Europe and CIS. It is a mechanism for exploring and tapping into new financial technologies and mechanisms to access investment for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They will discuss their activities related to crowdfunding, crowdlending , and crowdinvesting , ...

Ten months ago we had an eclectic group of people introduce a slew of new financial mechanisms- blockchain based cash transfers and impact bonds for reducing recidivism to forecast based finance for disasters and peer to peer lending for SMEs- emerging into what the ODI calls a new ' age of choice' for the development finance . We tackle this topic not just because there is a $2.5 billion gap in funding the current SDG agenda (even though ODA flows to developing countries continue to increase year on year). We are more tickled by the sheer explosion of money coming from other sources of funding that aren't high on the priority list of either development organizations or governments (admittedly this is fast changing)- the European alternativ...