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Making Technical Assistance Work in Africa: Three Keys to Success for Financial Services Providers
It’s not easy delivering data-driven financial services to financially excluded customers in Africa. That’s why technical assistance can be essential to these financial service providers' success. Dumisani Dube at Insight2Impact (i2i) explores the technical assistance programs that i2i provided to seven financial service providers across the continent, and shares what worked – and what didn't.
- Categories
- Finance
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Inside-Out: The Good and the Bad of insight2impact
Does this situation sound familiar? A development program generates lots of intriguing insights – but once it's over, these learnings end up languishing in a sparsely read report in the back pages of a website. That’s the scenario insight2impact (i2i) aims to avoid. As the program wraps up, i2i lead Hennie Bester describes how it's bringing the insights it has generated, from both successes and failures, to the organizations that can use them – including through a new partnership with NextBillion.
- Categories
- Finance, NextBillion Originals
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Splunk Ventures Launches With $150 Million to Fuel the Next Generation of Data Analytics
“Organizations around the world are not only racing to make faster, better decisions, they’re also hoping to turn data into business outcomes that are both cost and time effective,” Doug Merritt, Splunk president and CEO, said in a statement.
- Categories
- Investing
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Working With Data In Latin America: Challenges And Strategies
It’s important to analyze the obstacles associated with data collection in emerging economies, and what companies can do to overcome them.
- Region
- Latin America
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Revisiting our Assumptions About Digital Financial Inclusion: Three Unexpected Findings from BFA’s FIBR Project
When BFA launched its FIBR (Financial Inclusion on Business Runways) R&D project four years ago, it outlined a set of assumptions about how smartphones, increased connectivity and digitization would help to accelerate financial inclusion for small businesses in Africa. As the project wraps up, BFA Founder and Chair David Porteous explores which of those assumptions still hold – and which need to be reassessed as unanticipated developments have reshaped the market.
- Categories
- Finance
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The Evolution of Inclusive Finance Data: What’s Next for MIX
Since 2002, MIX has been a key resource for global inclusive finance data. Its initial focus was to build transparency in microfinance through shared data standards and common metrics, and it compiled a huge dataset, MIX Market, that became a critical source of information for the industry. But MIX recently announced two important shifts to its approach. CEO Camilla Nestor discusses these changes, and what they mean for MIX and the inclusive finance industry.
- Categories
- Finance
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Viewpoint: Cloud Computing Could Be Key to Speeding up Africa’s Development
What’s especially useful about cloud computing is that companies or organisations don’t need to own computing infrastructure or data centres. Instead, they can rent access to storage and applications, among other things, from a cloud service provider. This allows them to get access to sophisticated capabilities on demand. And they don’t have to spend a great deal of money building and maintaining IT infrastructure on site.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Is Your Data Collection Program Ready to Go Mobile? Four Steps (And a Free Guide) to Help You Get Started
From decision support to enhanced communication with beneficiaries, mobile data collection can be an incredibly useful tool for impact-based organizations. But for all its benefits, it's no silver bullet, cautions Sam Farnham at Dimagi. Farnham stresses the importance of doing due diligence on collection methods before moving onto digital tools, and offers a free guide for determining mobile data collection's relevance for your organization in this constructive post.
- Categories
- Technology
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