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India’s Jan Dhan financial inclusion drive hits customer service barrier
Creating new accounts is not enough. Banks’ behaviour towards low income clients is a major roadblock
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- Region
- South Asia
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Twitter Top Ten
This week brought a number of developments in global health, social enterprise and financial inclusion - some promising, some disturbing, and one bittersweet. As usual, we’ve highlighted a sample of the reaction to these events on Twitter, along with some long-form pieces that vividly describe some of the big challenges and small triumphs in the sectors we cover.
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- Education, Health Care
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A Revolution in the Making: CGAP’s Greg Chen discusses how smartphones could transform financial inclusion and microfinance
Smartphone sales are exploding in emerging economies, with Latin America and the Middle East/Africa recording growth rates of 59 percent and 83 percent, respectively, last year. CGAP’s Greg Chen discusses how this new access could transform low-income people’s interactions with their financial services providers in this video Q&A, the latest in our series on the Future of Microfinance.
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- Technology
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Ecocash Users in Zimbabwe Can Now Make Mobile Money Transactions in Local Languages
Users of EcoCash, the mobile money offering of Econet Wireless, are now able to transact in local languages after the company announced new enhancements to the platform.
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- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Human Touch Behind Digital Success: Microfinance institutions that go mobile need to support the people behind the technology
Technology is the enabler of digital services, but people are still the backbone. This is important for microfinance institutions to remember, since transitioning to mobile services requires considerable changes from staff. In the latest post in their series on how MFIs can go digital, Grameen Foundation explores best practices for making this transition.
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New GSMA Report Finds That Latin America and the Caribbean Have Fastest Growth in Mobile Financial Services Globally
At the Mobile 360 Latin America event today, the GSMA issued the report, ‘Mobile Financial Services in Latin America and the Caribbean: state of play, commercial models and regulatory approaches’, which examines the current state of mobile financial services across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. The report outlines important advances in mobile money adoption in the region, showing that nearly two thirds of markets have at least one live mobile money service. Today, there are a total of 37 mobile money services, accounting for roughly 14.9 million registered mobile money accounts, in 19 countries1 in the region. This includes seven new services launched in Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama and Peru since 2014.
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- Region
- Latin America
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Funding a Sector in Transition: Recent RCTs could reshape donors’ approach to microcredit
After a group of six studies published in January found that its benefits are modest at best, microcredit is stuck at a crossroads, says Matt Mossman. But as debate continues amongst practitioners about how to react to the new data, the findings could spark changes in the funding landscape for the sector.
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- Education
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Kenya’s Mobile Finance Revolution Takes the Next Steps: Two new developments go far beyond mobile money
Kenya’s mobile finance market is evolving, and for the country’s leading financial services players, that evolution has been a profitable one. But beyond M-PESA’s remarkable payments revolution and the continued growth of M-Shwari’s mobile banking services, there are two other important developments in the Kenyan market. MicroSave founder Graham Wright discusses their impact.
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