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> Posted by Center Staff
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This week the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and MasterCard forged a new partnership to develop inclusive financial systems to support small-scale farmers and lower-income families. The team’s first effort focuses on the Kakuma refugee camp in north-western Kenya, a settlement home to roughly 170,000 refugees who have fled wars and violence in neighboring countries.
The partnership seeks to harness the duo’s respective strengths: FAO in fighting hunger and malnutrition among the most vulnerable and hardest-to-reach, and MasterCard in expanding financial inclusion through digital services. Their initiatives will center on, among other elements, providing credit and cash to households in economically-marginalized communities for the purchase of basic needs and farming inputs.
> Posted by Saran Sidime, Operations Assistant, the Smart Campaign
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Technology has brought safe and simple financial solutions to Somalia, a place where, until the past few years, they were completely non-existent. In June 2015, MasterCard became the first international payment network to enter Somalia, a country that hasn’t had a formal banking or financial system since the collapse of its government in 1991. MasterCard issued its first 5,000 debit cards to be used by Premier Bank, one of the few commercial banks in the country. The cards will be compatible with Premier’s ATMs, whereby customers can conduct cash withdrawals. MasterCard’s products will be the first domestically-issued debit cards in Somalia, the last remaining country in Africa not under sanctions that the company hasn’t worked in yet.
Somalia has been mired in decades of conflict since 1991, and the government continues to battle al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab insurgents. Despite the formation of a federal parliament in 2012, creating a more stable government, turmoil continues to severely restrict development of the banking system. For example, the country installed the first ATM machines in the capital, Mogadishu, only last year.
> Posted by Matt Collin, Research Fellow, the Center for Global Development
The following post was originally published on the Center for Global Development blog.
In a few weeks’ time Australia’s Westpac bank will start closing down the accounts of money transfer organizations used by immigrants to send money home. Westpac is the last major Australian bank still offering services to organizations in the country’s US$25 billion remittance sector.
Two weeks ago, Merchant’s Bank of California also decided to close the accounts of all money transfer organizations (MTOs) sending money to Somalia. The source of Merchant’s decision appears to have been a cease-and-desist order issued by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) in June, purportedly due to the bank’s failure to appropriately monitor the destination of remitted funds.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing a trend here. In 2013, Barclays’ closed the accounts of nearly 90 percent of its U.K.-based MTOs, despite being the last large bank in the country willing to do business with remitters. HSBC made the same decision the previous year, following a nearly US$2 billion penalty handed down by U.S. regulators.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
Somalia is facing another potentially life-threatening drought. Aid agencies in East Africa indicate a strong possibility that drought in 2014 will be as severe as that of 2011, which resulted in the deaths of about 260,000 people. But this year, Somalia’s people may not be able to count on a trusted lifeline in times of drought: remittances from the United States and other countries. Remittances from the United States to Somalia are responsible for roughly $214 million annually, but increasingly, U.S. regulators are imposing a string of service provider shutdowns. If these services are constrained, the effects of a drought on Somalis will likely be exacerbated.
The reason for this challenge for cash flows between friends and family across the Somali diaspora? Regulatory issues centering on the risk of these remittances funding potentially dangerous individuals. In 2011, for example, two Somali-Americans from Rochester, Minnesota were convicted of supplying cash to the terrorist group al-Shabab. Such incidents prompt often sweeping regulatory action and/or preemptive actions by banks to avoid transactions involving Somalia.
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