The Nigeria’s representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund, (UNICEF) Jean Gough has said that one in five children in the North East of Nigeria will die because of inability to access some of the community and inadequate assistance for those being reached.

Gough said: “We estimate that there will be almost a quarter of a million children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Borno this year. Unless we reach these children with treatment, one in five of them will die. We cannot allow that to happen.”

In a related development and worried by the high levels of severe malnutrition and desperate conditions in most Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in north-east Nigeria, United Nations (U.N.) agencies and partners have stepped up assistance even as they canvassed more action and humanitarian assistance.

Access to credit is a key link between economic opportunity and economic outcome. Without the ability to obtain credit in times of need, businesses are harder to start and run, apartments are harder to rent, and emergencies can become disasters.

Until now, consumers in emerging markets have had limited access to credit in any form. Even when credit is technically available, it often requires days or weeks of form-filling and waiting. Mines.io provides an end-to-end platform where consumers can apply for a loan through a mobile phone, be instantly approved, and receive funds within minutes. This is made possible by a proprietary credit scoring system, which uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze multiple data sources and cost-effectively predict default risk for both banked and unbanked consumers.

Invented in Stanford University by Nigeria-born Professor Kunle Olukotun .

Kunle Olukotun has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University for the last 20 years and is an expert in parallel hardware and software systems.

They just received seed funding from Fintech Collective.

MoneyLion is an online lending company that specializes in consumer personal loans. It also provides free credit monitoring, personal financial management tools, and a unique rewards program that encourages good financial actions that can be used to redeem gift cards. In a piece in TechCrunch, the value in this startup is explained.

In a financial context, people are really bad at anticipating future frustration. If I buy an Apple Watch with my credit card now, my brain doesn’t want me to be able to imagine the bill in my mailbox. Customers check their credit score on MoneyLion an average of 3.9 times a month. This degree of transparency makes people sweat in the short-run but reduces the likelihood of bad decision making that induces long-term elevated stress.

The platform also leverages data to recommend loans when they are most needed. If spending patterns appear incongruent with prior months, MoneyLion can suggest a small loan to smooth things over. A user can receive overdraft warnings within the app and take a $200 advance in about 15 minutes. Tim Hong, one of the key behavioral architects of the platform, wants MoneyLion to dream big.

This product can save one stress in Nigeria if it can be built. But of course, the first is having the ability to track the expenses by linking all to BVN (bank verification number).

Alphabet (Google) is boosting its finance chops by appointing Roger Ferguson, the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and CEO of TIAA, as it’s 12th director.

Mr. Ferguson is Alphabet’s latest nod to Wall Street since hiring former Morgan Stanley executive Ruth Porat as its chief financial officer last year, a move seen as an effort to improve relations with investors. Shortly after Ms. Porat’s arrival, she helped lead a restructuring that split the core business of Google from a series of side projects like a research lab and internet provider dubbed “other bets.” The new parent company, Alphabet, has since given investors more details on the company’s finances.

Continuing with the latest trend of enterprises focused on capitalizing the massive interest in blockchain, IBM recently opened a tech garage in Soho New York dedicated to the development of blockchain tech. Cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and now IBM are deploying blockchain environments for both developers and SMEs. This is great news for the expansion of blockchain and making it “mainstream”, but is this more beneficial for the large enterprises or for the developers themselves?

Earlier this month, IBM announced the massive Watson Centre at Marina Boy in Singapore. Designed to house 5,000 computer scientists in the Asian-Pacific region, the location also included a new IBM Garage. Then, just last week IBM announced that Mizuho Financial had successfully tested a digital currency-based blockchain settlement system created at the newly opened IBM Garage in Tokyo.