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> Posted by John Gitau, CEO, Kenya Financial Education Centre
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What are the sources of income for the poor surviving on two dollars a day? While every financial inclusion advocate wants to recommend savings, credit, and insurance products to the poor, offered by the formal financial institutions, there is a loud silence on the earning component of financial capability.
Could the silence be judged as complacent satisfaction that the earnings currently available are good enough? Suffice it to say that even though the current financial products do not produce income for the users, if they are well designed, they should facilitate the earning of income and certainly the use of income in money management. However, we do realize that if we want to talk of increasing income, we are onto a whole different development agenda: livelihood.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
Understanding the cash flows and money management practices of the poor is a requirement for effectively designing financial services. Complex income scenarios and impossibly-thin budgets make finances for many poor people complex. It takes time and resources to capture such information in a meaningful way. Insight into these practices was sought in the ambitious Kenya Financial Diaries project, which included biweekly interviews with 300 lower-income households in Kenya over the course of one year. Results from the project were released earlier this week.
The Kenya Financial Diaries, a joint research project by Bankable Frontier Associates and Digital Divide Data, comprehensively tracked the transactions of households across Kenya using a customized, “intelligent” questionnaire. The questionnaire was tailored to each household’s composition, income sources, and financial devices used. As new information became available, the questionnaire adapted accordingly. Along with the quantitative records on their financial lives, researchers interviewed household members on their perceptions, stories, and life events affecting their finances.
The results?
> Posted by Anne Gachoka, Research Supervisor, Digital Divide Data
Thanks to mobile and agent channels, formal financial services in Kenya now reach millions of previously unbanked customers with new and innovative products. Just look at M-Shwari, the new banking product offered to M-Pesa customers enabling them to move beyond money transfer and epay to small, short-term loans with eligibility based on data about their savings, mobile usage, and debt repayment history. Globally, this is all very exciting and represents an important breakthrough in providing financial services to the poor.
But, after studying the interactions between the poor and the financial sector through the Kenya Financial Diaries, a joint-research initiative between Digital Divide Data and Bankable Frontier Associates, I have come to the conclusion that banking will fail to deliver on the promise of improving the lives of the poor unless providers do more to improve pricing transparency and communication on terms and conditions. The Diaries study tracked the cash flows of 300 Kenyan households over the period of one year.
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