> Posted by Center Staff
It’s hard to replicate the learning value that comes from a good infographic. One such gem we were glad to recently come across is The Kenyan Journey to Digital Financial Inclusion from GSMA. Released shortly after GSMA’s 2013 Mobile Asia Expo, the infographic chronicles the development of mobile money in its flagship country of Kenya. Through the infographic you can trace how policy decisions and product innovations worked together to connect three quarters of the Kenyan people to electronic payments and other products. It shows clearly how one innovation paves the way for more, leading to a burst of innovations in the past two years.
To view the infographic in greater detail, click on the image above.
For more fun with infographics, check out one we released for the second FI2020 Mapping the Invisible Market paper, Growing Income, Growing Inclusion.
Have you read?
An Armchair Safari through M-PESA-Land
Global Movement into the Vulnerable Class, and What it Means for Financial Inclusion
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July 18, 2013 at 6:52 am
Chris Linder
Thanks for the post! A significant inflection point I think but is rarely tied together with Kenya’s adoption of MPesa is not product or policy related but an external event-the political crisis of 2007-2008. During the turmoil, the entire country shut down including traditional remittance providers like banks and the informal ways like carrying it home or asking someone to carry it for you bc no one could travel. So no one could pull out cash or receive cash from someone else. Kenyans’ ingenious answer was not really reported by the financial press or in microfinance forums. They essentially used a new currency to buy goods at local shops so they could eat – airtime- not Mpesa. I remember several news reports of expat Kenyans buying airtime and transferring it to their families back home and the shopkeepers were accepting airtime to buy bread, etc. Then individuals and NGOs started appeals for money so they too could buy airtime for destitute Kenyans. I think this event and use of airtime in a time of crisis was a huge influencer on Kenyan’s willingness to try MPesa afterwards. (Though perhaps someone could conduct a study to confirm…) For one, MPesa was very close to the concept of trading airtime but more liquid, and secondly, they experienced a point in which they could not rely on the bank or informal networks but could rely on the mobile network…it was a wonderful story to follow in a very dark time, and I think we can learn from it as well when we complain about clients in other countries not adopting mobile money fast enough…