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Rural banks partner with telcos to boost microfinance
Rural banks will soon have their own set of “killer apps” to better compete with bigger banks and, more importantly, expand their microfinance services in the Philippines.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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With $2M from Eric Schmidt, biNu brings smartphone apps to dumb phones
Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures is leading a $2 million Series A round in biNu, an Australian startup that enables feature phones to run cloud-based smartphone apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google. BiNu highlights the opportunity in developing markets where smartphone penetration is low.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Technology
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New Data Reveals Massive (Potential) Mobile Money Market for the Poor : Across Africa millions are sending huge volumes of domestic remittances – mostly in cash
A few months back I wrote this quick piece highlighting some preliminary findings from data that was just coming in from a major study the Gallup organization did for us.
Now, the full data set is in and the results are quite interesting.
In collaboration with Gallup, we surveyed 11 countries in Africa (including Kenya) on the payment habits of the adult population. To my knowledge, this is the largest study of its kind – tracking money transfer and payment behavior in the developing world.- Categories
- Education, Technology
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Poor women to get mobile feeds on their financial info
Poor women in Andhra Pradesh could soon get access to their financial transactions on mobile.About 90 lakh women members of self help Groups (SHGs) in Andhra Pradesh can look forward to this facility, thanks to a mobile book-keeping project being launched by the State Government.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Mobile Money: How Cell Phones Can Fight Hunger in the Sahel
Some five billion people worldwide were using mobile phones in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union, with the strongest growth taking place in developing countries. Africa is the fastest growing mobile market. In the past six years, the industry estimates that the number of subscribers has grown nearly 20 percent each year. At this rate, we can expect to see some 735 million cell phone users in Africa by the end of 2012.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Grameen Foundation, KfW and CARE’s Access Africa Fund Invest in World’s First 100% Mobile Microfinance Institution
Grameen Foundation, KfW and CARE's Access Africa Fund announced they have each purchased a 25 percent stake in Musoni Kenya, the first microfinance institution to provide financial services to the poor entirely via mobile phones. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, it provides microloans largely to people who are underserved by the formal financial sector. This investment will help Musoni Kenya grow its operations, deepen its penetration in rural areas where financial inclusion is lowest, and pave the way for it to receive a license to accept savings deposits from the Central Bank of Kenya.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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NexThought Monday: Putting M-PESA’s Success into Perspective, Why B2B Will be Slower than P2P
M-PESA is a shining, unusual, inspiring success. And while the service is wildly popular in person-to-person networks, surprisingly few businesses use it. If M-PESA is to penetrate the business-to-business market, it will need to avoid the pitfalls of other brands.
- Categories
- Technology
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New Apps for the Bottom Billion
When it comes to mobile communications, there's still a lot of room for innovation at the bottom. In Bangalore, India, researchers from the University of Toronto and Microsoft are now imagining new business models for the world's poorest phone owners by adapting a little-known protocol that can receive pictures as bitmapped text messages. The technology could readily be used in the roughly 1.5 billion low-end Nokia and Samsung phones in circulation.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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