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Educational Transparency through Digital Finance Plus

A chain of primary and pre-primary schools in Kenya offers parents the ability to pay and track school fees with their mobile phones. The service is aimed at increased efficiency and transparency.

YouthStart: Training Banks to Serve Young Customers

Youth have become a core concern in many African economies, yet most financial institutions are not equipped to address them as real potential customers.

Is Tanzania Ready for Interoperability in Mobile Money?

Even though interoperability could potentially benefit the mobile financial services market, thus far there have been few attempts to get mobile money systems to work together. It may be too early for interoperability in some areas, Tanzania seems ready.

Is Kenya Ready for an MVNO?

Kenya recently granted MVNO licenses to several new companies, allowing them to provide mobile money services without building new cellular infrastructure. This could shake up the mobile money market in Kenya, which has been dominated by Safaricom.

Can Mobile Money Extend Financial Services To Smallholder Farmers

On paper, digital financial services can sound like a silver bullet to reach millions of rural, underserved smallholder farmers. In reality, the challenges can be greater than the deployment of a low-tech solution.

Bringing Mobile Wallets to Nigerian Farmers

Cellulant developed a mobile wallet network in Nigeria that extends to some eight million farmers. With more than 40 million transactions in just two years, smallholder farmers in Nigeria are poised to adopt digital financial services more broadly.

China and Kenya: Different Models for Scaling Branchless Banking

In China, branchless banking initiatives are starting to reach scale, but the story has different foundations from other country success stories, such as Kenya.

Preparing to Spend a Year with Smallholder Farmers in Tanzania

The preparations for the smallholder farmer household financial diaries continue in Tanzania, Pakistan and Mozambique. Here we discuss the site selection process in Tanzania, which we completed in advance of the sampling and recruiting of households.

Why Financial Diaries to Understand the Needs of Smallholders?

CGAP is working with Bankable Frontier Associates to conduct a financial diaries project on 90 families in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Pakistan.

Water by Phone: Transforming Utilities in the Developing World

As World Water Day is being recognized around the globe this Saturday, we take a look at how mobile money is making clean water more affordable and accessible in Kenya.

How Greenfield MFIs Advance Market Development in Africa

A report from CGAP and IFC explains how greenfield microfinance institutions help advance financial market development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The most significant effect of greenfield MFIs appears to be their contribution to professional development in the banking and microfinance sectors.

Smallholder Financing: Meeting Demand Between Harvests

For smallholder farms, expenses come early in the season before the planting while income arrives only several months later with the harvest. How, then, can these farmers access the cash they need to plant their crops and, more importantly, to survive between harvests?

Banking on Including Women in Nigeria

In Nigeria, Diamond Bank is using customer insights to design and market a new savings product for women.

Prioritizing Complaints Handling with Third Party Ombudsmen

More and more countries are realizing the importance of establishing proper mechanisms for handling complaints within financial institutions and establishing proper external or third party recourse systems through ombudsman schemes.

Improving Education with Financial Innovation, Chapter-by-Chapter

Kytabu is a Kenyan-based company that offers a textbook subscription service where users can pay in small increments for individual chapters of textbooks and read the content on their cell phones. The company hopes to make educational materials much more accessible and affordable in Kenya.

Advancing Financial Inclusion for Women in Africa

This blog discusses what role policy makers and regulators can play to advance financial inclusion for women in Africa.

The Worrying Trend of Interest Rate Caps in Africa

Many countries in Africa have established interest rate ceilings to protect consumers from high interest rates charged by microlenders. However, despite good intentions, interest rate ceilings can actually hurt low-income populations by limiting their access to finance and reducing price transparency.

FinMark Trust and Financial Market Development in South Africa

At a time when neither the government nor the private sector in South Africa were clear about the obstacles to reaching the base of the pyramid with financial services, FinMark Trust demonstrated how an effective market facilitator can develop an evidence base to inform policy and approaches.

Understanding Customers for Financial Innovation in Ghana

The branchless banking market in Ghana is promising but has not gained traction as expected. CGAP and Tigo Cash decided to collaborate in order to better understand what’s preventing Ghanaian customers from actively using mobile money.

Small Farmers, Mobile Banking, Financial Inclusion in Madagascar

Madagascar is among the poorest countries in Africa and also ranks low on the continent for financial inclusion. However, there is a great deal of innovation taking place in the country targeted at people living in rural areas.