Archive for: Kenya: SPP Challenge Fund

Kenya is a world leader when it comes to fostering mobile phone banking and other “branchless” banking services. Officials there have an excellent opportunity to create regulations that will support the development of a variety of branchless banking models. The Government of Kenya and the Central Bank have shown a strong interest in branchless banking and have expressed their commitment to institute legal and regulatory changes that will support new technology-based products and services and enable increased outreach.

Read the full report at http://cgap.org/portal/site/Technology/policy/diagnostics/

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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.

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What do you do when your client is nomadic, lives in an area with no electricity, roads, or GSM coverage, but plenty of bandits?

Two CGAP partners are devising solutions to just such a situation in Kenya. Vodafone and a consortium of PayNet, Kenya Commercial Bank and Sevak Solutions are awardees from the Social Protection Payments Challenge Fund, co-financed by CGAP and FSD Kenya.  The two awardees are developing prototypes to deliver social protection payments to families with orphans and food insecure households in the arid north bordering Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Both have chosen approaches that rely on technology to drop the cost of delivering the grants, while giving beneficiaries and others access to other financial services.

But northern Kenya is a tough environment to do banking. In an area the same size as the UK, there are 3 bank branches. In one district, Kwale, a family of five typically gets by on 300 Kenyan Shillings per day, or under USD 5. Garissa district houses a major refugee camp for Somalis. About the busiest place is Loki, with 100 flights daily for UN and other agencies staging relief aid into Southern Sudan. Why so many flights? Because police have declared the road impossible to protect from bandits, starting 600 km to the south.

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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.

Banking agents, retail and postal outlets handling banking transactions for financial institutions and mobile operators, are mushrooming all over! It took less than four years to cover almost all of Brazil. Colombian banks established 3,548 service points in just one year. In Peru banks manage more than 2,500 agents. Equity Bank in Kenya is piloting agents in rural areas. Xac Bank in Mongolia is planning to develop an agent channel….

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