Mesofinance Media - News #Kenya

Revolut links mobile wallets in Europe to bKash in Bangladesh, M-Pesa in Kenya

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 16:52:48 -0500

Revolut, a UK-based fintech with 35 million customers in 150 countries, recently added a mobile wallet feature to its product menu, allowing users in Europe to send money to individuals in Bangladesh and Kenya, based on the recipient's phone number or email address. People in Bangladesh can access funds via the bKash mobile money services, which is affiliated with the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC. In Kenya, recipients can access funds via M-Pesa, a service of UK-based Vodafone.

"Sending money home is a problem many expats face and so it is essential to provide a service that simplifies this and facilitates affordable and convenient international money transfers," said Akshat Mittal, Revolut's General Manager for International Payments. Revolut, which was launched in 2015, offers services such as insurance, investments, peer-to-peer chat, payment-card processing and vacation-home rental. The firm reports having brought in total revenue of USD 1.1 billion during 2022.

Financial Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities \ Adriana Carolina Armos Cuesta et al \ Alliance for Financial Inclusion

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:20:41 -0500

Adriana Carolina Armos Cuesta and her colleagues analyzed the National Financial Inclusion Strategies of 16 countries. Although 1 billion people in the world live with disabilities, this segment comprises less than 0.5 percent of the customers of global microfinance institutions. Approximately 80 percent of those who live in low-income countries and have disabilities do participate in the informal sector through self-employment. However, the World Bank estimates that the remaining barriers to the economic inclusion of this group reduce global GDP by 5% to 7%.

The obstacles preventing people with disabilities from accessing formal financial services include: (1) lack of education; (2) discrimination; (3) inadequate training of staff of financial services providers; (4) regulatory frameworks that fail to incentivize FSPs to design services for people with disabilities or to foster greater “access [to] and usage of adaptive financial technologies;” (5) lack of access to mobile phones - particularly smartphones; and (6) shortage of data to assess the needs of people with disabilities and to create and monitor programs and policies to address those needs.

Among the actions noted from the National Financial Inclusion Strategies are: (1) expansion of Kenya’s National Development Fund for Persons with Disabilities; (2) lowered tills and access ramps in financial institutions and social welfare offices in Uganda; (3) documents offered in braille, sign language translation and ramp installations in bank branches as well as job quotas for people with disabilities in Pakistan; and (4) tactile features added to paper currency in the Philippines.

In closing, the authors suggest three measures: (1) increasing access to assistive financial technologies; (2) gathering data classified by type of disability, age and gender to improve policies and product development; and (3) developing government plans targeting the three dimensions of financial services: access, usage and quality. As part of this process, the authors emphasize the importance of engaging people with disabilities - and representative organizations - in all phases of the strategies: design, execution and monitoring.

This is a summary of a paper that the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) published in November 2023. The authors are Adriana Carolina Armos Cuesta, Isabela Pradere da Silva Ramos, Daniel Ricardo Meza Rodriguez, Diana Schvarztein and Robin Newnham.

Summary by: Renata Samadova

Digital Gabon Project seeking to boost access to procurement channels, identification documents, health insurance, social protection payments

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:17:59 -0500

The government of Gabon recently received financing from the World Bank for the Digital Gabon Project, which is intended to expedite the adoption of digital public services. Efforts to maximize data security span the entire effort, whose elements include: Enabling Environment for Accelerated Digital Transformation; Modernizing Legal ID Systems; and Digital Transformation of Public Administration and Select Services. Among the goals of the project is to engage groups that under-utilize government services, such as people with disabilities and members of indigenous groups, to access government contracts for their businesses as well as health insurance and social protection payments for their families.

Author: Yuchen Jin