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Surveys Reveal a Path to Responsible Digital Finance in WAEMU

For the first time, there is comprehensive data on digital financial services users in the WAEMU region, and it highlights the need for more responsible digital finance ecosystems. Strengthening consumer protection is crucial.

User-Centered Financial Services Build Household Resilience

"Resilience" refers to the ability to anticipate, respond to and recover from shocks. Freedom from Hunger used “resilience diaries” with 46 households in Burkina Faso to research whether financial services could play a greater role in building household resilience.

Building Resilient Households in Burkina Faso

Freedom from Hunger conducted a 7-month project using the diaries of rural households in Burkina Faso to gauge how formal, non-formal and informal financial products affect household resilience.

Is Digital Finance Hitting its Stride in WAEMU?

Digital finance is advancing in WAEMU, but within the region there are eight countries all with unique markets facing disparate challenges. When it comes to mobile money and financial inclusion, the question for some is "where do you start?"

What Does it Take to Build Resilient Households in Burkina Faso?

“Resilience” seems to be the mot du jour among development practitioners these days. In the financial inclusion context, resilience refers to a person or family’s ability to weather shocks. But how do households in Burkina Faso define it?

Savers Deserve More Attention and Protection

Access to finance in the West African Economic Monetary Union and Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa grew significantly from 2001 to 2011. However, more attention must be paid to savings and savers.

Mobile Money: Even Data Analytics Has Limitations

While quantitative data analysis is a useful first step in understanding active mobile customers, it is even more insightful when providers actually go and talk with their customers directly.

Côte d’Ivoire: A Perfect Time for Mobile Money?

Côte d’Ivoire has seen its mobile money industry make significant progress in recent years. The latest results from the sector suggest good prospects moving forward. At the end of Q3 2012, there were 2.6 million registered mobile money clients across all providers in the market. This post explores the recent market dynamic in this west African country.

INOVA: Oasis of Innovation in the West African Desert

INOVA is the first e-money issuer authorized by the central bank in Burkina Faso to offer services of its kind. It is the first company to have a top-notch platform for the Inovapay wallet developed and implemented in the developing world, offering services that are multi-channel, multi-operator, multi-currency, multi-lingual, and multi-institutional.

Wari: A Local Platform Heads to the Global Market

This post is the second of a three-part series this week on the CGAP and the Mobile Money for the Unbanked blogs on the topic of mobile financial services in francophone West Africa. Partnerships in new markets have been critical to the success of their strategy and so far, it seems to be working. Wari conducts around 1.5 million transactions per day or 40 million transactions per month, the vast majority of which is occurring outside of Senegal.

The Last Frontier for Branchless Banking: State of Play in WAEMU

Access to finance in WAEMU is very low, even by comparison to other regions of Africa. The rate of bancarization announced by the BCEAO in December 2010 was 9.5% and 12.7% of the population had an account with an MFI.

West Africa Switches on Mobile Money: Headlines for June 22, 2010

We’ve been saying for awhile that mobile money will be less compelling in places where good alternatives to cash already exist, for example, in developed markets such as North America. Despite that, the folks who look after how payments get cleared has opened a door for mobile.