10 Myths About M-PESA: 2014 Update. Screen Shot 2015 02 06 at 13 17 08.
M Pesa + Bitcoin. How It Works. How it works GiveDirectly provides a wealth transfer service to the extreme poor in Kenya. We operate an end-to-end model and do not outsource or subcontract work to other organizations. Your donation moves through a payment-processing service or by check to our bank account. We identify poor households in Kenya and Uganda. We do this using modern technologies including electronic data capture, digital mapping, and remote sensing. To date this process has located exceptionally poor households: our average recipient lives on $0.65 per day and only 15% of households report having enough food in the house for tomorrow.
More about our enrollment process We select regions with high poverty rates using government data. We transfer your donation directly and electronically to recipients. We move money from our US bank to our account with an electronic payments provider via a foreign exchange broker. More about our transfer process in Kenya More about our transfer process in Uganda. Low tech, high relevance and African SMS-based service potential. How Eneza Education shows the SMS-driven service potential. Startup founder Kago showed me his really simple to use yet really useful app only a few days after I met him at iHub, Nairobi’s hot tech center. To use it, you just need to send a text message and you’ll receive SMS quizzes in various topics : science, maths, swahili or even social studies. After a few shots, you’ll probably find yourself texting quizzes waiting in supermarket lines and commuting in buses (I missed a stop a couple of times). This mEducation app is called Eneza education and it aims at coaching Kenyan kids before classes (or giving them another chance when they drop out).
Low tech, high relevance & appropriate technology. My first Skype calls connected to this month of ‘net-exploration’ in East Africa, Paul Falzone (founder of a media NGO in Uganda) explained me why in 2013, he was using audiotapes, DVDs & VDCs (Video CDs). His NGO aims at broadcasting educational and advocacy messages. How mobile phones are making cash obsolete in Africa. When he rolls into a gas station to fill his tank, Barkhad Dahir doesn’t get out of his car. He punches a few buttons on his cellphone and within seconds he has paid for the fuel. With the same quick keystrokes on his phone, he pays for virtually everything he needs: groceries at the supermarket, a few oranges from a market stall, a shoeshine on the street, a cup of sweet milky tea from a café, and even, if he wants, an afternoon’s worth of khat, a mild drug favoured by many Somalis. “Everyone here has his own bank, with easy access and no restrictions,” boasts Mr. Dahir, a local journalist.
“Even lying in bed, you can be paying your bills.” Here in one of Africa’s poorest countries, where illiteracy is high and traditional banks are almost non-existent, a mobile revolution has created an informal electronic banking system with more efficiency and convenience than anything in Canada. It’s an innovation that could transform the continent. “I haven’t seen cash for a long time. Mobile Money for the Developing World. A rapidly increasing number of people across the globe are now staying connected to one another via a mobile phone device – whether it’s an iPhone, Nokia, or Samsung. In fact, the United Nations reported earlier this year that the worldwide figure for cell phone subscriptions had topped five billion at the end of 2010. According to the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 3.8 billion of these mobile subscriptions were from developing countries – with India and China fueling this upsurge.
As the number of mobile phone users rapidly increases across the world, the mobile financial services market is also booming, and is increasingly dominated by Asia. Photo by Karl Grobl. As this trend continues, the mobile financial services market is also booming, and is increasingly dominated by Asia, driven by mobile, operator-led initiatives in these developing nations to “bank the unbanked.” Government-run welfare transfers Mobile phones present a viable means for such cash transfers. VC4Africa – Venture Capital for Africa - Connecting Entrepreneurs and Investors.
Cell phone minutes: the next currency. It might just be my old nature mind, but I still find it a daily miracle: being able to walk into the bakery around the corner and trade a piece of paper – called money – for a loaf of bread. We tend to associate virtuality with video games, but when we think further we realize it has penetrated our lives ages ago. Take money; it is as virtual as the Matrix, but as long as we all believe in it its value it works fine.
Back to Africa. We’re not used to Africa taking lead in new technology. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention and it couldn’t be more true in case of Africa, where pre-paid airtime is fast becoming the ‘virtual’ currency, overcoming conventional currency exchange and lack of banking infrastructure. There are over 100 million mobile phones in Africa, and it is one of the fastest growing mobile regions. Recently when the violence in Kenya flared up, pre-paid cell phone cards became the most valuable good around. Sources: Why Africa, TheWorld.org, Reuters. Mobile Money Africa | Africa's leading online resource for Mobile Financial Inclusion. Kenyans Find the Unintended Consequences of Mobile Money. In Western Kenya, “Sambaza” is both a marketing slogan and means for despair. It means “to spread.” Vodafone-owned Safaricom, the dominant mobile provider in Kenya, uses it as a brand name for a service that allows customers to transfer airtime to each other.
According to a new study (pdf) funded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMFTI), the word has also come to refer to the way money in a mobile account slips away, drip by drip, as friends and family ask for favors. People who work in economic development use the term “unbanked” to describe the roughly one in three people in the world who don’t have a formal bank account. Adopting mobile money, however, is not as straightforward as substituting a phone account for cash in a jar. A paper published in March by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, a nonprofit group, looked at text and call data in three African countries to figure out what drives adoption of mobile money. EPROM - Why Africa? Today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of 2.4 billion mobile phone users worldwide.
Africa, with Kenya at its forefront, is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. Over the past five years the continent's mobile phone use has increased at an annual rate of 65 percent - twice the global average. In June of 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2004 the country had 3.4 million subscribers, and in the last 18 months this number has grown to over 5.6 million, despite the fact that only 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity. According to the government's 2005 Economic Survey, Kenya’s small business sector, which employs the majority of workers in the nation, created approximately 437,900 new jobs last year. A large part of this boost comes from the innovative use of mobile phone technology by local entrepreneurs.