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Bank of Ghana to Make Mobile Money Platforms Interoperable
The Bank of Ghana has initiated a project to implement a mobile money payment infrastructure that will enable the seamless transfer of funds from one network provider to another (interoperability).
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- cash transfers, fintech
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Mark Zuckerberg is on a surprise visit to Nigeria, Facebook’s largest African market
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is visiting Nigeria for a few days. Zuckerberg says he’ll be “meeting with developers and entrepreneurs, and learning about the startup ecosystem in Nigeria” during his time in Lagos. In line with this, Zuckerberg’s first notable stop was at Co-Creation Hub (Cc Hub), in Yaba, Lagos’ Silicon Valley-style ground zero for start-ups.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid: Exploring the “digital poverty stack” – Part 2
In the first post in this series, we proposed that donors and governments advance digital and financial inclusion by focusing more on creating public goods that enable the broader ecosystem, rather than on peripheral innovation in service delivery. In this second post, we discuss the implications of this shift and highlight some new efforts to move the fields in the right direction.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
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The AgTech Pedestal Problem: How to Bring Innovation Down to Earth
Without the knowledge to operate it and systems to maintain it, technology is a liability rather than an asset to a farmer. It cannot work in isolation. We must be careful not to place AgTech on a pedestal; AgTech can only be successful if it is grounded in the realities of the developing world farmer. But we're already seeing several examples of that emerging from "Silicon Plateau."
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Mobikwik to Provide Mobile Wallets to Slum Dwellers With NGO Samagra
Payments company Mobikwik is partnering with non-government organisation Samagra to provide ICT-enabled mobile wallets to the urban slum dwellers the NGO works with.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Nigeria’s Paga Is Succeeding Where Others Mobile Money Providers Failed
Paga, the biggest mobile money service provider in Nigeria, plans to increase its agents across the nation to 30,000 by 2018 as it seeks to become the county’s largest mobile financial access points across Africa’s most populous nation. The mobile money services provider, which was founded in 2012, currently has 10,104 agents in 35 states across Nigeria, with 3,000 in the commercial city of Lagos.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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IBM’s Effort to Solve Health Problems in South Africa
IBM Research has established a new research centre in South Africa (its second research centre on the African continent), and has announced several new project collaborations in the area of data-driven healthcare.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid – Exploring the ‘Digital Poverty Stack,’ Part 1
Donor investments to leverage technology have largely failed to achieve their imagined potential, often producing sub-scale pilot projects which do not solve a real problem. Instead, donors should focus on building a “digital poverty stack,” a set of interoperable and reusable digital tools that can be built into a large number of applications.
- Categories
- Technology