GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2014 Mifos Initiative

Research Mobile Money Services in Central Africa

completed by: Hydra

mentors: Edward Cable

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See https://mifosforge.jira.com/browse/MIFOSX-1707 or read on.

Digital financial inclusion services delivered via mobile money have the potential to have dramatic impact on the unbanked. The most well-known mobile money service out there is M-Pesa in Kenya; there have since been hundreds of other services deployed that allow clients to conduct financial transactions via the mobile phone - this includes sending payments to other users, paying bills, repaying loans, opening savings accounts, opening loans, etc.

This task involves doing Google research on the mobile money services available in a given region. For each country in that region, you will research and input into a spreadsheet various facts/details about the mobile money service including # of subscribers, products offered, date started, etc. Each country will likely have multiple mobile money services so don't forget to research all of them.

This specific task is focusing on Central Africa. Edit the Central Africa tab in the Google Sheet: http://goo.gl/YdwmRo. Please reference the services for Kenya which have been started as an example.

A helpful place to start in seeing where all the various mobile money services have been deployed is the GSMA MMU Mobile Money Tracker: http://www.mobileworldlive.com/mobile-money-tracker. GSMA also produces other sources of data and publications to summarize the global landscape of mobile money services for the unbanked: https://gsmaintelligence.com/topics/3363/dashboard/

You can also view CGAP Technology Blog (http://goo.gl/96IH1o) which posts regularly about mobile money: http://www.cgap.org/blog/four-mobile-money-trends-imf-financial-access-survey

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