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From Kentucky to Kenya: Celebrating Financial Inclusion’s Potential – And Facing its Limitations
The financial inclusion industry is arguably more innovative and attuned to the needs of low-income clients than ever before. But how much of an impact can it make in a world where the problems of poverty and income inequality increasingly plague not only low-income countries, but wealthy ones too? We discuss the issue as NextBillion's Financial Inclusion Month concludes.
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MIT in search of Africa’s most innovative entrepreneurs
According to the MIT Legatum Centre, the Open Mic Africa program seeks to find and showcase Africa's top innovators while developing a dialogue among local entrepreneurs, investors and MIT.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- innovation
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There are too many e-wallets in India and most are near-empty
While the Indian e-wallet industry’s size stood at an estimated Rs154 crore in 2015-16, it is expected to zoom to Rs30,000 crore by the end of 2021-22. And everyone, from financial technology companies to banks to the government-backed National Payments Corporation of India, is scrambling for a share of that pie.
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- Region
- South Asia
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Kiva.org Reaches $1 Billion Milestone in Crowd-Funding Loans Disbursed Globally
Kiva provides financial support to low-income borrowers, enabling individuals from all over the globe who have few other opportunities for financial assistance to receive a critically needed loan.
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- Uncategorized
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- microfinance
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Commentary: The Surprising Resilience of Cash Transactions
While Singapore, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and Switzerland are among the least cash reliant countries, in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Peru and Egypt, only 1 per cent of transactions are cashless. Even some highly advanced countries, such as Japan, are still highly reliant on cash.
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- digital payments
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MobiCash Launches MobiSpaza in South Africa
The new platform is a spaza sector-focused mobile platform and is an inclusive business tool that builds bridges between spaza sector stakeholders, such as private corporations, state-owned entities, co-operatives, and not-for-profit organizations, and the township communities they serve.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- fintech
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Building Tools to Measure How, and How Much, Consumers Benefit from Financial Inclusion
It's easy to affirm that financial inclusion is increasing. It's more difficult – because of a lack of reliable and actionable tools – to determine how adults derive value from financial inclusion. To address that need, insight2impact recently developed and tested a needs measurement framework concept that takes users’ actual usage patterns into consideration.
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Fintech companies take on banks, telcos with big data arsenal in Africa
Developing markets such as Kenya do not yet have the levels of Internet penetration and e-commerce sophistication to attract these online giants turned fintech entrepreneurs. At the same time, a stable of local fintech companies are sprouting and they are expected to mature as fast Internet becomes more affordable and as Kenyans embrace shopping and banking online.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- digital payments, fintech
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