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> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
#142765195 / gettyimages.com
Islamic finance is expected to expand substantially in 2015, from 2014’s total of $2.1 trillion to $2.5 trillion, according to figures released last week by the Al-Huda Centre of Islamic Banking and Economics. In 2011, the industry had assets of about $1 trillion. Islamic microfinance, the segment of Sharia-compliant services targeting clients at the base of the pyramid, only occupies a small slice of the pie, at 1 percent of all Islamic finance globally. However this uptick in Sharia-compliant finance, as well as encouraging recent support for the 650 million Muslims living on less than 2 dollars a day, suggest a rising tide for Islamic microfinance.
The industry findings indicate that not only did Islamic finance surpass the $2 trillion landmark in 2014, it gained traction in nascent markets and entered new ones. Markets still green in offering Islamic finance that showed growth in 2014 include Morocco, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Libya, and several non-Muslim-majority countries including Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa. Among the new markets where Islamic finance took root last year are Australia, Brazil, and China. Globally, there are 1,500 organizations working in Islamic finance across 90 countries – 40 percent of which are non-Muslim-majority countries. The expansion of Islamic finance opens the door for the many Muslims whose beliefs preclude them from accepting finance with interest rates and fee structures outlawed by Sharia doctrine.
> Posted by Danielle Piskadlo and Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Program Specialist and Communications Associate, CFI
In Iraq and Afghanistan, about 23 and 35 percent of people live below the poverty line. Both countries have microfinance industries, though they’re small and financial inclusion rates are low. In the effort to combat these low levels of inclusion, an unlikely financial service player, the U.S. military, is using the principles of microfinance to optimize fund dispersal by local ground commanders in order to strengthen communities in conflict areas.
Charkh, Afghanistan
We recently become aware of this military effort when contacted by a group of West Point cadets interested in learning more about microfinance. In the conversation we learned that U.S. military ground commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan each receive about five thousand dollars a month to allocate as they see fit toward development projects in the local communities where they are posted. The money can go towards public roads, schools, medical clinics – projects contributing to community rebuilding and reconstruction. These allotments from ground commanders are part of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) developed in 2008. Currently, ground commanders don’t have specific guidance on how they should allocate these funds so they often rely on suggestions from village elders, who the cadets recognized are sometimes biased and self-interested in the projects they recommend.
The cadets are therefore working to develop a portfolio optimization template – based on the principles of microfinance – to guide ground commanders on how to allocate their CERP funds as microgrants to help raise the standard of living within local communities. The project objective is to enable ground commanders to allocate their funds as loans to small-businesses, entrepreneurs, and individuals, facilitating income growth, economic development, and community strengthening. The template is modeled after microfinance practices because of similarities in distribution methods found between microcredit loans and the financial aid provided by ground commanders through CERP funds.
> Posted by Adam Brown, International Development Discourse Group (IDDG) Member
The following post was originally published on the IDDG Blog.
Since 2008, the Afghan mobile phone provider, Roshan, has worked to bring mobile money services to Afghanistan. With the support of USAID, all four of Afghanistan’s major mobile phone providers are currently developing mobile money capabilities. The highly successful rollout of Kenya’s mobile money and banking service, M-Pesa, has spurred a flurry of similar startup efforts – over 72 in 42 countries. Many countries, however, have failed to experience the kind of success that M-Pesa achieved, and Afghanistan is no exception.
While the mobile money program in Afghanistan is in its nascent stages, the factors that helped M-Pesa to succeed are generally lacking. The most important of these are, 1) a dominant mobile carrier; 2) an economy that depends on long distance money transfers; and 3) customer trust in the system. The Afghan mobile phone market is too divided to create the kind of widespread network required to attain the critical mass necessary for a sustainable customer base. Further complicating the issue is the fact that Afghans generally do not rely on remittances, limiting the utility that could draw future users. To fix that, mobile money providers should include banking mechanisms early in their programs instead of tacked on only once a money transfer system is in place. However, trust in banks, especially since the Kabul Bank scandal, may be too low for Afghans to put their money into another bank-like mechanism. While mobile money is not destined to fail in Afghanistan, proponents of mobile banking and USAID should adjust their expectations for success, or at least be ready to address the above issues.
> Posted by Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative, the Council on Foreign Relations
The following post was originally published on Democracy in Development, Coleman’s CFR blog.
Imagine life without a bank account. Completing a simple financial transaction can require traveling a distance, incurring expenses, and losing precious income. Savings are more difficult to track and certainly don’t earn interest. Theft or loss of the proverbial “cookie jar” is a constant worry. Indeed, studies show that informal savers lose as much as 25 percent of their hard-earned cash each year due to theft and loss. Yet for over 2.5 billion people globally, this inconvenient, inefficient, and expensive reality is the case.
There are many reasons to believe that the number of unbanked people will shrink significantly in years to come, with important positive implications for economic growth and poverty reduction. First, grassroots and country-level efforts, both nonprofit and for-profit, are already showing how “unbanked” doesn’t have to be the status quo—and these efforts are greatly facilitated by mobile phones. Kenya is well-known for the widespread use of its mobile money system M-Pesa, which allows people to pay for goods and services through cell phones instead of with cash. Started in 2007, M-Pesa has already been used by the vast majority of Kenya’s adults.
Second, major financial institutions are supporting efforts to give more of the world’s population access to bank accounts and standard financial tools. Last summer, I wrote about Visa’s purchase of the mobile payments system Fundamo and the collaboration between USAID and Citi to expand financial inclusion, a promising instance of big financial institutions bringing their resources to bear on closing the financial inclusion gap.
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