Archive for June, 2011

Our Work in Mobile Financial Services

Friday, June 24th, 2011

Elizabeth Berthe is the Director of Mobile Financial Services at Grameen Foundation

Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Financial Services team is working in several regions around the world to help make mobile financial services simple, affordable and accessible to the poor.  We are working to innovate on three fronts:

  • Overcome technology barriers to facilitate integration of mobile solutions for microfinance institutions
  • Research to inform and influence the development of financially inclusive products as well dissemination of best practices
  • Implementation projects focusing on processes, evolving business models and relevant products.

Around 2.5 billion adults around the world do not have access to formal or semi-formal financial services – nearly 90 per cent of whom live in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East yet more than half the world’s population have access to a mobile phone and nearly a quarter use the internet as developing countries rapidly adopt new communications technologies. Access to financial services provides poor people with much greater resilience to economic shocks and increased capacity to increase or stabilize their income. Mobile phones can play a vital role in financial inclusion.

Through our work with Village Phone we discovered early on that many users sent pre-paid airtime as a form of money transfer saving the fees to travel to transport funds.  Airtime would be purchased then sent to a broker for example who in turn would resell the airtime for cash and pay for goods or services such as school fees and this transfer would take place via text messaging.

In 2007, Safaricom, Kenya’s leading mobile network provider, formalized this process with the creation of M-PESA.   This service allows users to deposit funds into a virtual account store on the mobile phone, send funds via text message for a fee to transfer or receive money, pay bills or purchase airtime.  Cash can be withdrawn from the system for a feeat an agent location, this agent acts as a “human ATM”.  M-PESA is recognized as the most successful mobile phone‐based financial service in the developing world with more than 20% of the annual GDP of the country flowing though the system annually.

(Jack/Suri 2010) revealed that between 2007 and 2009 the percent of M-PESA users who were unbanked doubled (25 to 50 percent) and the number living in rural areas also increased (29 to 41 percent). M-PESA users are not just using the service to send and receive money – 81 percent of customers now use M-PESA for savings, for example. Most importantly, 91 percent of people said their lives would be impacted negatively if they no longer had access to M-PESA.

Grameen Foundation’s team in Kenya is focused on learning and disseminating information to enable mobile financial services programs elsewhere to accelerate as well as working directly with the microfinance sector to adopt mobile financial services so that they can continue to increase and deepen their outreach to the poor.

Due to this vibrant space, we would like to share learnings from our work and happenings in this fast changing but ever exciting arena.

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Think gardening is hard? Try farming.

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Heather Thorne Matthews is the Director of Information and Communications Technology Innovation at the Grameen Foundation’s Technology Center.

When I was in Uganda about a month ago, I spent 2 days living in a village with one of our CKWs, Simon, and saw first-hand how the farmers we are serving through the CKW program live.  Simon is featured in the video below where he explains the Community Knowledge Worker program to one of his fellow farmers.

I understood that life was hard for our CKWs and their neighboring farmers, but it really hit me after doing manual labor in my own small urban yard all weekend.  I had an electric edger, hoe, shovel, rake, broom, hose and wheelbarrow (albeit with a flat tire).  In comparison, the smallholder farmers we work with in Uganda work their land by hand, have few tools, rely solely on the rains to irrigate their crops, and often carry their harvest in bags on their heads, working through the day without lunch.   They come back to their huts in the evening where there is no shower, or refrigerator with iced tea to cool them off.  Yet they are thankful for what they have, and they get up each day and do it again.

By 3pm Sunday afternoon, several hours into my own gardening project, I could hardly walk.  I limped upstairs and lay flat on my cool floor for an hour, back aching and every muscle twitching.  Could I do this every day, if I had to grow my family’s food to survive?  If a Western development organization came offering to help, what could they possibly do to make my life better?

The easy answer would be “give me money”, but the more nuanced answer is give me confidence, capability, knowledge and financing so that I could buy better seeds and fertilizers, earn more from the same amount of work, and eventually increase my earnings, perhaps buying tools and hiring help so that the backbreaking work could be shared.  Once I saw my earnings increase, I could access additional financing so that I could grow my farm, diversify into new crops or livelihoods, and send my kids to school.  Once that flywheel is in motion, real change can occur, but as with all bold endeavors, the hardest part is to start.

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AppLab Indonesia wins Global Telecoms Award for Best Mobile Application Innovation

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Congratulations to the AppLab Indonesia team!

From Left Aldi Haryopratomo (Ruma), John Stefanas (Qualcomm), Camilla Nestor (Grameen Foundation)

Together with our partners, Qualcomm Wireless Reach®, Ruma and Bakrie Telecom, the AppLab Indonesia team was awarded the Global Telecoms Award for the Best Mobile Application Innovation on June 7th in London.  This is well deserved recognition for the considerable investment of time, energy and creativity of the AppLab team, led by Farid Maruf in Jakarta and guided by Sean DeWitt in our Washington, D.C. office, who over the past several years has worked tirelessly to create our technology innovation hub in Indonesia.  Heather Thorne from our Seattle office and Happy Tan in our Manila office have also played instrumental roles in this achievement.

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