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Sun King Joins Kenya’s Growing Smartphone Financing Race
"Sun King’s move comes as Kenya’s smartphone market becomes harder to simply define by ownership."
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Press Release: Afreximbank Academy and CreditRegistry Join Forces to Equip Millions Across Global Africa With Financial and Trade Skills
The alliance combines AFRACAD’s leadership in trade, development finance and institutional capacity-building with CreditRegistry’s expertise in financial literacy, consumer credit education and digital learning
- Categories
- Education, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Naran Secures $10 Million to Empower Gig Economy Drivers Across Emerging Markets
The company tackles a pervasive issue in emerging markets: gig economy workers often lack the credit history or steady, verifiable income required to secure traditional bank loans.
- Categories
- Finance, Transportation
- Region
- Global
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Philippines Taps AI to unlock Bank Loans for Small Businesses
The agreement aims to strengthen creditworthiness, boost productivity, and streamline loan application processes for local entrepreneurs.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Designing Credit Systems for Informal Economies: Why More Data Alone Is Not Enough
The global financing gap for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) is estimated in the trillions. As Ayokunmi Sodamola argues, the reason for this gap is not that these enterprises exhibit poor financial behaviors — or even that there’s a lack of data that can be used to establish their creditworthiness. It's that standard credit assessment systems aren't designed to capture and interpret the data generated by their informal financial activities. He explores how lenders can build a more integrated approach that treats data, identity, trust, risk and incentives as interconnected layers of a single credit system.
- Categories
- Finance
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Nigeria’s CreditChek Raises $600,000 to Expand its Credit Data Infrastructure Across East Africa
With this new funding, CreditChek plans to deepen its integrations across key East African markets, working closely with banks, microfinance institutions, and fintech lenders.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Leveraging the Currency of Trust: How Social Commerce Data Can Inform Risk Management and Bring Formal Finance to Women-Led MSMEs
Across emerging markets, millions of women entrepreneurs operate in trust-based economies invisible to formal credit systems. As Nabilla Prita Fiandini and Monica Christy at MicroSave Consulting (MSC) explain, these businesses rely on their social reputations and customer relationships to survive, and often use platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp to market their products. They share insights from a recent MSC report based on surveys and interviews with hundreds of social sellers across Indonesia, exploring how data from these entrepreneurs' social commerce activity can be used to boost their access to formal finance.
- Categories
- Finance
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AI Risk Management in Digital Finance: Protecting Africa’s Underbanked from Invisible Threats
Digital finance has been a game-changer for financial inclusion across Africa. But as information technology security analyst Nathaniel Adeniyi Akande explains, many communities remain excluded — and though AI-powered lending tools offer new opportunities to reach them, these tools also introduce new risks that can undermine trust or even exclude the people they are designed to serve. He argues that it is digital lenders’ responsibility to anticipate and mitigate these threats, and explores several practices that are essential to AI risk management in the sector.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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