We need to give digital mobile technology time to temper. Imagine a tall building constructed with uncured bricks and upon completion, everybody is herded in to live in and do business. A small earthquake can have devastating results. Mobile technology is just too new to be overloaded with digital financial services. Financial services are little understood even in their raw nature through brick and mortar infrastructure. Will a more efficient rail make them easier to understand?

If we are to borrow from the transport sector, we have air, water, road and rail as modes of transport. Now we have digital transportation mode. The existence of each mode of transport has many consideration and one of the most important but overlooked is diversification. We need different modes of transporting ourselves and our things. But in financial inclusion, we want to take digital transport mode as the solution to all our digital goods and services transport and everyone with a financial product is queuing to enter and trade within the system, including targeting customers whose needs and abilities to buy are unknown.

The youth actually need protection. The fact that they have picked technology up with zeal doesn’t mean we inundate them with digital financial services while we have done little to enhance their financial literacy. If, through technology, we want financial institutions to easily access the youth to offer them loans even before they know how to earn, I would rather they remain inaccessible.

We are not talking much about how mobile technology can help improve financial literacy. We are aware that teaching financial literacy isn’t lucrative. Yet that is where we advocates of financial inclusion should start. We need to face the fact that financial services providers spoiling to get their financial services digitally to the youth have their profit motives upfront. Mobile phone providers need to be checked in the first place as they are supplying financial services through the back door to the gullible consumers most of them the youth. In Kenya, you can borrow airtime at 10% interest. It doesn’t matter if you repay within the day. While airtime isn’t a financial service, borrowing it at an interest makes it a renegade financial service. Nobody seems worried that a credit at 7.5% per month is indeed a loan at 90% per annum. Why should digital credit become so expensive( the loans market rate is 18% pa)? Is digital credit provision a license to overcharge?

But since we can’t stop the providers designing and pricing the products the way they want, our refuge is extending financial literacy to the young and old. If we, advocates of financial inclusion support financial services being delivered digitally while aware that customers, especially the youth are ill prepared to evaluate them effectively, then we shall be accomplices in the crime of delivering our youth to the financial services slaughterhouse, collaborating with insensitive profiteers. I get worried daily to see how financial inclusion is being used by old and new financial services providers as a marketing gimmick to drive in business and make a financial kill. Yet, financial literacy is not moving at the same pace as the proliferation of financial services. For us financial inclusion adults, allowing financial service provider access to our children and youth while they are financially illiterate is not any different from giving children loaded guns to play with.