Book of the month: Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day

by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven.

Review by Tamsin Scurfield, Head of Refugee Finance at Opportunity International UK.

Portfolios of the Poor is a fascinating and accessible study of the financial lives of low-income households in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa over the course of a year. It brings a human-centred lens to the concepts we use in microfinance—financial management, planning, and product design—by connecting client behaviours with real people and stories.

It is a rich read: one that you could read it in one sitting, or dip in and out of.

Several things stood out to me. Low-income households often manage complex financial lives, juggling multiple small savings pots and loans at the same time. People save through churches, savings groups (sometimes more than one), at home, on their phones, or in a bank. They may also borrow from many of these sources, as well as from friends, neighbours, shop credit, or informal petty trade. Balancing savings and debt is often a daily task.

As someone who is quite organised in their own finances, I was struck by how complex and uncertain financial management can be for low-income households. The book shows that debt is not always a sign of financial distress; it can also be a practical tool for smoothing daily consumption, investing in small businesses, and covering unexpected illness – something we often see among refugees, where resources are frequently diverted to meet health needs.

Poverty is, above all, about managing uncertainty. It is not only about having too little money, but about not having money at the moments it is needed. Low-income households respond with active, complex financial strategies.

The book reinforces what I see at Opportunity: access to finance alone is not enough to create lasting change. Strengthening savings groups, providing safe ways to save, building financial literacy and management skills, and designing products that address liquidity challenges can help people manage risk and invest in their futures.

Above all, I came away with deep respect for the effort households put into managing daily consumption needs and cash flow. These are the kinds of programmes we should prioritise: approaches that go beyond credit alone and provide financial services shaped around the realities of low-income households.

May: Unbowed by Wangari Maathai

Review by Brigitta Falcin-Dyson, Communications Manager at Opportunity International UK.

Wangari Maathai is one of the most inspiration women I’ve read about - a passionate protector of the planet and a strong, defiant voice for women in Kenya. Unbowed is the autobiography of Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In the book, she shares her experiences of growing up in colonised Kenya, her education and work as an ecology professor, and her time fighting against a corrupt government to preserve green spaces in Kenya.

I first came across Maathai in a BBC Sounds clip in which her daughter shares her powerful story. I was moved by Maathai’s heroism in protecting the environment. With a background in conservation and anthropology, I connected with her passion and the issues she cared about. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, an organisation that empowered local women to plant trees and restore their communities. In Unbowed, she reflects on the vital role trees play in sustaining ecosystems and supporting livelihoods – without them, both the land and the people who depend on it suffer.

It’s difficult to capture in full depth all the remarkable events in her life in just a few hundred words. But what stood out most to me when reading her book were the injustices she faced as a woman and her determination to uplift other Kenyan women by encouraging independence and self-reliance. Her story is a powerful reminder of the importance of educating women and girls, and how many of the challenges she faced 20 years ago, are still experienced by women in Africa today.

As I read her book, I saw echoes of the work Opportunity does with women today. Women are resourceful and innovative; they simply need the right tools, access, and education. It’s what Maathai understood back in the 1970s, and it’s what Opportunity continues to champion today.

April: A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts

Review by Kate Holt, photojournalist and Director of Arete. 

A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts, is an ambitious yet eloquent read. It is part travelogue and part deep dive into a footnote in history that acts as a lens through which to examine the mindset underpinning European empires in Africa.

Its central storyline is King Leopold II’s eccentric scheme to domesticate African elephants in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The King’s brutal exploitation of the region’s abundant natural resources resulted in millions of deaths. The premise of training elephants initially feels faintly comic against this backdrop, but it quickly becomes clear that this scheme is just a prism through which to view the deeper elements of Leopold’s relentless extraction and control of land, animals and people that defined his rule.

What stayed with me most were the journeys Roberts traces across the continent, following the remnants of this scheme. The places she visits are not treated as a backdrop to European ambition, but as vivid landscapes with their own histories, cultures and nuance. The deep dives into historical archives sit comfortably alongside present day encounters that quietly challenge the assumptions of the past.

With captivating clarity, the book explores how vast tracts of land were appropriated with no regard for traditional systems of stewardship or shared ownership, and how labour was forced through coercion and violence. It also traces the beginnings of the massive destruction of fragile ecosystems in the name of financial gain and modernisation.

The narrative resists moralising, but the critique is clear. What lingers is not just the strangeness of the elephant school, but a broader pattern of overreach, entitlement, and misunderstanding. It is unsettling precisely because it shows how logical these ambitions once seemed.

The legacy of this destruction remains today. The humanitarian crises across the Great Lakes region, seen in the vast refugee camps in Uganda, Rwanda, eastern DRC, and Burundi stand as a testament to the violence and greed that these ideas helped set in motion.

Kate visited Nakivale Refugee Settlement with Opportunity in 2019. There she photographed several refugees and recorded their stories. She has shared some photos from her visit to Nakivale below, as well as a photo from the DRC that demonstrates the displacement she mentions in her review. 

March: Ten Types of Humans by Dexter Dias

Review by Catherine Manser, Head of Philanthropy at Opportunity International UK.

First things first: this book is long. I picked it up on the recommendation of a friend who founded TogetherintheUK (TGIUK), a charity supporting migrants in the UK, so I knew it would be a thoughtful, challenging read, and probably not something I’d breeze through in an afternoon. At 848 pages, I wasn’t wrong!

Dias’ framework of “types” is ultimately about what drives human behaviour – why some people turn towards compassion and justice, while others turn away. What stayed with me most were the sections set in or focused on Africa. Dias doesn’t treat the continent as a backdrop; he tells real, complex stories – some hopeful, some devastating – that reveal how systems shape people’s lives in ways that are often invisible from the outside. His case studies, from women challenging discriminatory norms to communities navigating conflict or climate shocks, are handled with honesty and respect. Dias gives voice to realities that are all too familiar to us at Opportunity:

• Women farmers carrying the weight of entire agricultural systems while being denied land rights, financial tools, and support.
• Young people pushed to the margins of economic opportunity because of systemic exclusion.
• Communities whose resilience is repeatedly tested by conflict, climate shocks, and entrenched inequality.

Throughout the book, Dias weaves together psychology, human rights, and personal stories in a way that made me reflect on my own assumptions about why people act the way they do, whether courageously, cruelly, or somewhere in between. It’s a book that lingered long after I stopped reading, partly because it forced me to reckon with some really uncomfortable parts of human behaviour, but largely because of the extraordinary resilience I read about in between. Africa is not presented as a backdrop for tragedy, but as a landscape of profound agency, resilience, and courage. Reading these stories through the lens of our own work feels both grounding and galvanising.