Archive for: Democratic Republic of Congo

A mobile money user in Afghanistan

As everyone who reads this blog knows, there’s been a great deal of excitement over the last few years regarding the potential for mobile money to solve a host of development problems. And as we’ve all learned over that same period of time, it’s not as easy as it looks, or at least as easy as Kenya made it look. Countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, even the newly minted South Sudan are all experimenting with or thinking about mobile money implementations. In addition to the normal issues and challenges facing policymakers and service providers, post-conflict and post-disaster countries face additional problems that merely serve to exacerbate the overall challenges with mobile money.

1. Skilled resources are scarce commodities in a post-conflict region. Finding experienced staff that can implement and/or regulate mobile money services is hard enough in most places, but finding those people and convincing them to go live and work in high-risk locations is proving almost impossible for service providers, governments and donors alike. Recruitment and hiring can take many months, and even when good people are found, at high cost, many leave early, deeming the stress, danger and distance from family not worth the price. What usually results is a procession of short-term consultants (like me) coming in to dispense advice but not sticking around to help get it implemented, meaning things take twice as long to do and often achieve half as much.
2. Introducing innovative mobile financial services in a country that is struggling to form a stable government can embroil a new market in larger coordination problems, especially when private enterprise and government services are both involved. Mobile money is a new area of regulation and may require coordination between different parts of government, which can be hard in markets where governments are newly formed or struggling to manage disaster recovery. In the absence of clear direction, you could end up with situations where regulators act hastily and unilaterally, which may lead to turf battles with other ministries. For example, in a couple of markets, the telecommunications ministry has demanded – and charged a fee for – a “letter of no objection” for a mobile operator to offer mobile money services. In others, the regulator will ask for a specific identification document for account opening when another part of the government is still struggling to even implement such identification. Haiti is a good example of this where many people either never had particular identification documents or they lost them in last year’s earthquake. Read the rest of this page »

That was fun. What did we learn? 

We reaffirmed that small, including micro, enterprises have proven themselves to be reliable and sustainable ways to help people out of poverty and that, in that context, we have abundant proof that microfinance is a workable idea.

MFIs, although having reached increasingly impressive numbers of people, must nonetheless recognize that more than two-thirds of the inhabitants of developing countries remain to be touched by the MFI mission of bringing the advantages of banking to the unbanked and under-banked.

Read the rest of this page »

Happy Monday…this Monday is more auspicious than most because it’s the start of our three day conference looking at how technologies such as card-based networks and mobile phones could increase access to finance. IFC is a co-organizer, and Visa is a sponsor.

Want to know more? Visit here for the full agenda.

We’ll be posting presentations as we get them…and this link should take you to a live video stream of the event.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Lazarus Muchenje. Based in South Africa, Muchenje is the CEO of Celpay Holdings (Pty) Ltd., which operates mobile phone banking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. He says working within existing regulations – which often do not take into account the technology – is Celpay’s toughest challenge.

Tell me about Celpay. We really operate in two markets, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. If I was to compare the two then Zambia is a little less challenging, the stage of development today vis-a-vis the Congo. Zambia has been a democratic country for a long time, while DRC has just had its first democratic elections last year.

Regulations are not clear-cut? In DRC we don’t have clearly defined legislation governing e-commerce yet. This is quite normal in a post-conflict country, however, if tomorrow a new law to regulate e-transactions, that does not support our current business model is promulgated this may jeopardise our investment. The Central bank of Congo has assured Celpay that they are working on the necessary regulatory framework. In Zambia, the National Payments Systems Act has just been promulgated last month. It is very broad in its current format but it is an excellent starting point in defining how e-commerce is regulated. Generally I would say the regulatory environment is extremely challenging, from undefined to starting to define how to manage e-transactions, e-commerce. Read the rest of this page »