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Agriculture, Health, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

The Intersection of mHealth and mFinance: A mHealth Alliance Report

Photo Credit: mHealth Alliance

The mHealth Alliance recently released their second white paper on the interconnection between mobile health and mobile finance services. Entitled “Advancing the Dialogue on Mobile Finance and Mobile Health: Country Case Studies” and co-authored by Menekse Gencer, Founder of mPay Connect, and Jody Ranck, the report focused on four separate countries with varying degrees of intersection between mHealth and mFinance – Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, and the Philippines.

The report was commissioned in order to further explore how business models in the mHealth sector have leveraged mobile financial services (MFS) to improve the access and reach of health care in developing countries. The objectives included identifying new use cases that have shown promise at strengthening health systems, showing the characteristics in markets that have allowed MFS to improve the health care system, and recognizing the trends and challenges in how MFS can be implemented into mHealth projects. The goal is to continue to open the eyes of health providers, NGOs, MNOs, and government health agencies in developing countries to the ways that MFS can increase the care provided to the poor.

Benefits of Using MFS in Health Care

The authors make the argument in the report that mHealth can be assisted by MFS along the entire continuum of care (pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, birth, and postnatal) at multiple levels – patient, provider and administrative. Its uses at the patient level include all aspects of formal financial services (savings, insurance, and credit) to help smooth consumption as well as mobile money transfers to pay for medical services or transportation via cash. For providers, MFS allows for quicker remote payments to occur for health services and products along the supply chain and settlement of patient vouchers. Finally, at the administrative level, mobile payments allow remote and unbanked health workers to receive their salaries and reimbursements as well as for families to receive conditional cash transfers.

Countries

The countries selected have a diverse infrastructure in the MFS market and drivers from the private or public sectors, but the authors discovered three trends in each country:

1. A significant health concern that needed to be met

2. MFS had already launched in the markets

3. Either the business model, the quality of the services, or the accessibility of critical healthcare services was suboptimal without the use of MFS.

In Ghana, insurance has been pushed by the government. In a partnership with two MNOs (MTN and Tigo), Microensure has provided customers on the networks with life insurance. The drivers for this service included the need for assistance in covering funeral costs, the lack of a public option for life insurance, and consumer demand of insurance products which was caused by the government’s push to educate its citizens on health.

In Haiti, the driver of MFS in mHealth was the effect of the earthquake in 2010. After grants were provided to MNOs to develop mobile money services after the earthquake, the MNOs saw an opportunity to expand their services into mHealth with the cholera outbreak. This includes utilizing MFS to dispense medical supplies to stop the spread of the disease across the country.

The Philippines is the first country to heavily adopt MFS, and now they are leveraging the large adoption rate to provide health services. The government is now supporting the use of mHealth to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality rates through the well-developed MFS infrastructure. This includes payment for health products and vouchers for health services.

Finally, Kenya has utilized M-Pesa to pay for medical services and transportation at the patient level, payments for remote diagnostics at the provider level, and dispensing of conditional cash transfers and salary payments at the administrative level. M-Pesa was the driver along with Universal Health Care (UHC) in Kenya.

Key Challenges and Future Trends

The authors noted that there were multiple challenges discovered in their research and included brief look into the future of MFS and mHealth. The challenges included the MNOs desire for exclusive partnerships, scaling of services that need greater customer information, risks of cross-sector initiatives in markets with low mobile money adoption rates, shared phones which make it difficult to implement ID management systems, and exorbitant setup costs because of lack of interoperability between mobile money providers. As for the future, the authors see that these challenges will decrease with increased adoption rates of MFS and the decrease of the costs of utilizing MFS in the mHealth sector. Finally, the authors see a greater need for quality data to be accessible by both healthcare and financial service providers. The idea is that more quality data about a patient’s health and finances will allow for micro-insurance to be provided. It would allow for re-insurance to be provided to private or public insurance schemes to provide greater protection to those providing the insurance. The authors see a lack of movement in this space because of this lack of data. They see technology as a tool that would provide this information and expand the reach of insurance to the poor.

March 16, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile Money Interoperability: A Solution or Just Expensive?

Photo Credit: Szymon Slupik

In a report released in February, GSMA examined the value generated to both consumers and mobile operators by developing interoperable mobile money systems. Entitled “The case for interoperability: Assessing the value that the interconnection of mobile money services would create for customers and operators” and co-authored by Neil Davidson and Paul Leishman, it was released through the Mobile Money for the Unbanked unit of GSMA.

The report focused on the idea that increasing the interoperability between mobile network operators (MNO) would be better for customers as it would allow greater ability to send money from a phone on one network to a phone on another network. With the understanding that a network’s value to a consumer depends on how many other people they can connect to, there is an obvious benefit to operators creating interoperability between each other. But the article finds that developing interoperability will not create the necessary value to customers in order for MNOs to profit off the investment. The authors came to this conclusion by examining it from both the consumer side and the producer side.

Value to Consumers

By researching the competitiveness of mobile money services, the authors found that there were only three markets in the world that could be labeled as competitive. Although 25 countries have multiple operators providing mobile money services, only three had adoption rates from multiple MNOs that would dictate a need for interoperability. They next turned their attention to discovering the specific problem that interoperability would solve. In viewing the habits of consumers in markets with mobile money, the research showed that they had figured out a workaround to transferring money between mobile networks. Since there is a low cost to purchase a SIM card from another MNO, consumers can “multi-SIM.” This means that depending on which operator the receiver is using, the sender can switch their SIM card in order to send the transfer. With the advent of dual-SIM phones (two ports for SIM cards), multi-SIMing is made easy with no need to switch out the cards manually. In Uganda, a survey from June 2010 showed that 43% of mobile money users multi-SIM. Along with the hardware workaround already available, the mobile operators have allowed unregistered accounts to send and receive money. Registered customers have the ability to send money to unregistered customers. Since all that is needed in order to collect the transfer is a secret code, an unregistered user can give the code to an agent and withdraw the cash. This is called an off-net transfer. The opposite transaction can occur as well as with an unregistered user sending a transfer to a registered customer. This is called an over-the-counter (OTC) transfer. While this does not completely kill the consumer value to interoperability, customers have already discovered and are using workarounds at no further cost to them or the mobile operators.

Value to MNOs

The author’s argument for why MNOs would invest into developing interoperable systems is a simple one – because it will create greater revenue. Mobile money is provided as a value-added service to create greater loyalty in the customer base as well as having them increase the amount of money they spend. But creating a system that works with other mobile operators is not free – nor cheap. The investments would include human resources and infrastructure. But the main question is how would this investment make more money, if at all? Value-added services are used for two reasons – keeping existing customers and enticing new customers. And one or both will have to pay for this service. But since it has already been shown that current customers are already willing to use a workaround to transfer between separate mobile providers, it is not clear that interconnecting systems will create greater loyalty or attract new customers.

Along with the unclear pain from customers about the need for interoperability, the authors made the argument that the investment in it could take away from other investments that could increase loyalty or simply pass the cost of directly onto customers. Unless a clear business reason is discovered, it seems like interoperability will not occur in the near future. But that does not mean it will never occur; just that it is too early for it now.

March 13, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile Money for Women: Greater Mobile Adoption or Development of Specific Services?

Photo Credit: The Guardian

GSMA, through its mWomen program, has invested its resources in expanding the knowledge of why there is such a large gender gap in developing countries. As stated in the report entitled “Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity” (written by Vital Wave Consulting), there is gap between male and female mobile phone ownership in low and middle-income countries which totals 300 million. The report also includes results from surveys about why women did not own mobile phones – cost, need, fear of technology, and cultural issues. In terms of mobile money, there seems to a clear benefit to families if mothers have access to formal financial services. This includes the ability to save and make payments. Research from around the world has shown that mothers are more likely than husbands to spend more on the health and education of their children. But, as shown in the large gender gap, women do not have the same access to mobile money simply because they are lacking the hardware in order to utilize the services. As the work to close the gap continues, it is important to understand how women are using mobile money. This allows for products and services to be designed for women and their needs and desires. Today there are clear examples of mobile money being leveraged by women in developing countries.

As written about last month on this blog, women in Eastern Kenya are utilizing mobile money to make payments into informal savings groups. It also has been used to make payments into a women’s co-operative in Zimbabwe. The convenience of sending payments via mobile money has allowed women to focus on their businesses and/or their families. Traveling long distances to markets not longer limits their ability to make payments on time. These are two examples in which women have decided to fold mobile money into their informal financial services. This is a clear sign that women are seeking more formalized financial services, specifically focused around convenience of mobile payments. Since they have limited access to services that men has access to, like bank accounts, they are using mobile money in innovative ways to make up for the lack of services they have.

So there is a large gap in mobile ownership between men and women. And women do not have access to some of the financial services provided to men. But there are examples of women creating their own services via mobile money. So the question is: if we want to increase women’s access to formal financial services via mobile money, should we focus more on increasing women’s mobile phone ownership or should the focus be on developing mobile banking services specifically for women? This is a difficult question, particularly because the elephant in the room is their husbands. And this elephant is preventing both issues: low mobile ownership and access to formal financial services.

As mentioned in an interview with Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, women have requested greater confidentiality. The goal of their request is to keep their husbands out of their finances. Mobile money is a possible way for women to hide money from their husbands, if they control the phone or own a separate one. If it is a shared phone, the ability to hide money from their husband becomes harder. This would be a reason to push harder to increase mobile ownership. But ownership with not immediately mean that women will begin to have financial freedom. Clearly mobile ownership needs to be pushed further but understanding the cultural dynamics in each country and region will be important in the development of future mobile banking products and services for women.

March 8, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

IFC’s Report on Mobile Money: A Framework to Analyze a Country’s Readiness for Mobile Money

Photo Credit: Bancore Mobile Financial Services

On February, as a part of the ICT Learning Days at the World Bank, Sonja Oestmann, the Director of Consulting and Partner of Intelecon, presented the findings from a report commissioned by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) about mobile money. Entitled “Mobile Money Study 2011,” the reports focused on the mobile money markets in four countries – Nigeria, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Brazil.

The IFC has committed to further expanding financial inclusion by 2013 and see the potential in mobile money to help reach this goal. But while it has been successful in some countries, it has yet to take off in others. By focusing on vastly different countries in terms of region, socio-economic conditions, and financial infrastructure, the focus of the report was to show the different ways in which mobile money can be used as well as the business models that make them sustainable. It also used Kenya and Japan as examples of countries in which mobile money has succeeded.

Framework

The report included a framework to assess the sustainable viability of mobile money in a country as well as the most appropriate business model to utilize. This includes the partnership strategy, the necessary regulation environment, and the development tracks of mobile money products and services. By creating a structure of the market research that must be conducted, the report is aimed at providing this knowledge to regulators, mobile network operators, commercial banks, microfinance institutions, telecommunications manufacturers, and all others interested in expanding mobile money opportunities.

User Demand

The report also examined where the user demand of mobile money is based on the major money flows within each country. Based on these flows, the report listed the following as potential areas of demand:

Government-to-person (G2P) payments
P2P transfers
Payroll payments from small companies in the informal sector
Public transport payments
Bill payments to major utilities (e.g., electricity and water), postpaid mobile accounts, fixed phone subscribers, pay TV (cable and/or satellite)
Retail payments
Business-to-business (B2B) payments
Credit and microfinance
International remittances
Savings

Survey Findings

Surveys were conducted in order to further understand how and why individuals were using (or not using) mobile money in the four countries. One of the more interesting findings from the survey is the ability of marketing to increase the adoption of mobile money. Individuals using the service became aware of it directly from either the bank or the MNO. But the nonusers heard about the service indirectly from mass media. The conclusion in the report is that increasing adoption could be done more effectively through direct marketing with a personal touch. Another interesting finding is the state of the formal financial services effect on the perceived value of mobile money. In countries where the financial services sector is less extensive, mobile money is seen has a cheaper and faster alternative. But in countries with a strong financial services sector, cost and speed were not as important. Its perceived value was seen as an increased convenience.

Conclusions of Studies

The main conclusion from the report was that the value proposition for mobile money depends on the existing financial service infrastructure. When financial services are unavailable to a larger population, there is a higher demand for fast and cheap money transactions. But as the services improve, partnerships between banks and MNOs increase in significance. At the same time, the demand for mobile banking decreases as other e-payment services become competitors. In countries with an established and advance financial services sector, the demand for new services is based on performing at higher speeds, with greater frequency, and increased convenience.

March 6, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Mobile, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Ericsson and MTN partnership boosts m-wallet

Ericsson, leading mobile phone company, and MTN, Africa’s largest telecom operator, announced a strategic new partnership to boost the m-wallet services in Africa and the Middle East.

Christian de Faria, MTN Group Chief Commercial Officer, delighted to partner with Ericsson on expanding m-wallet. (image: file)

Announced at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain on Monday, MTN will become the first operator to officially deploy the Ericsson’s Converged Wallet platform. Both companies said the service is “a new complementary service to the integrated pre-paid charging system and mobile financial services solution for MTN consumers in those regions”.

The new m-wallet reportedly delivers a fast track route for MTN to introduce relevant, new and differentiated m-wallet market offerings to its Mobile Money customers.

As part of the co-operation, Ericsson said it would offer a prime integrator engagement model encompassing “software, systems integration and managed operation services”.

Christian de Faria, MTN Group Chief Commercial Officer, said, “Optimizing the Mobile Money consumer experience directly impacts consumer stickiness, and with Ericsson Converged Wallet we can now address our strategic priorities by enabling rapid response to our consumer’s preferences and expectations”.

MTN said it currently has more than 5 million mobile money subscribers in 12 African countries.

“2012 will be the year of partnerships across the emerging m-commerce eco-system. MTN has long been an early adopter in mobile money, and this new partnership builds on our ongoing relationship of collaboration,” said Hans Vestberg, Ericsson President and CEO.

“Driving accelerated time to market for operators and linking wallet accounts to purchases across multiple payment systems is a clear next step in next generation mobile financial services.”

Joseph Mayton

February 29, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

FNB’s mobile money shows significant growth

screen shot of FNB mobile money platform

A view of the mobile account screen shot on the FNB app (image source: file photo)

FNB recorded a 150% growth in the number of cellphone banking transactions and 1384% eWallet growth comparing December 2010 and December 2011.

A view of the mobile account screen shot on the FNB app (image source: file photo)

2.4 million transactions were conducted on cellphones during December 2011 in Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Swaziland and Lesotho. In total R214 million was transferred. In December 2010 it was only R986 000.

Botswana, the bank’s leading cellphone banking subsidiary outside South Africa, saw just over 1.3 million transactions, a 126% increase year-on-year.

International Telecommunications User (ITU) research indicated Botswana has 2.3 million cellphone users. Namibia recorded year-on-year growth of 155%, Zambia 308% and Swaziland 227%.

Ravesh Ramlakan, FNB Cellphone Banking Solutions CEO, says service growth reflect consumers’ increasing confidence in mobile handsets in the African market.

“Innovation has played a key role in growing cellphone banking across Africa. Our ability to adapt the service for use on any cellphone has been an important driver of this growth,” says Ramlakan.

Since inception, FNB eWallet has generated 407 110 original sends in its four African operations (Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho and Zambia) at the end of December 2011. In Botswana, FNB eWallet original sends increased by 1236% year-on-year from December 2010 to December 2011.

eWallet allows FNB customers to send money to anyone within their borders. Recipients do not need a bank account as money is transferred instantly. With a pin code sent to their cellphones, recipients access cash by entering the code at FNB ATMs.

Yolande van Wyk, FNB eWallet Solutions CEO, says despite eWallet’s recent introduction to markets outside of South Africa, the service demonstrated continued potential future growth.

“A country like Zambia for example has 5.4 million mobile phone users and a large informal sector, making a solution such as eWallet ideal in helping bridge the financial services gap between the banked and the unbanked,” says Van Wyk.

Staff writer

February 15, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile money technology: not easy, but why?

Close up of mobile phone with "Send Money" as the option displayed on the screen In recent months, unflattering headlines in response to technology related challenges. When the technology platforms through which mobile money services are delivered experience downtime, customers are unable to transact and agents are unable to earn a living. Understandably, both quickly become distressed. Recent headlines have brought attention to this problem, but to be clear, it’s neither new, nor limited in scope to a couple of deployments: for years, the world has read about M-PESA’s downtime in Kenyaon Twitter, and countless other services have faced similar challenges to varying degrees that, because they are smaller, haven’t attracted the same headlines.

Why is it so difficult to install and operate a reliable mobile money technology platform? This is not a question that can be answered in a blog post, but I’d like to highlight some key issues and invite readers to contribute in the comments.

Throughput and reliability
To begin, it’s worth clarifying the complexity of the problem at hand. A mobile money technology platform must meet the performance objectives of disparate industries: telecom systems that are optimised for throughput, and financial systems that are optimised for reliability. So “mobile” suggests throughput, and “money’ suggests reliability: operating a platform that delivers both is anything but straightforward.

Customization
In many cases, operators have a specific set of business requirements and aren’t willing to settle for a vendor’s off-the-shelf platform: they want a customized solution. Vendors that routinely concede to operators’ requests for customization are left with the daunting task of managing multiple versions of their platform. To put this in context, imagine every one of Visa’s member banks demanded a solution that would allow them to implement a unique purchase process and feature-set: it would be chaos. Mobile money technology vendors who find themselves in this situation, albeit at a much smaller scale, are faced with a difficult task – and it’s often compounded by their scarcity of resources.

Planning for the peak is costly
Some of the technology challenges faced by operators today have their roots in decisions made years ago, before it was clear what scale mobile money might achieve. In one prominent case, a software application and system configuration that was designed for a limited pilot made a rapid pivot and was rolled out nationwide. Inevitably, there were scale issues.

But even with time to plan, coping with scale is tough. Operators must anticipate the peak transaction volume their platform must be capable of processing (this is significantly different from a monthly transaction forecast) and design, invest, and manage accordingly. To be clear: this is expensive, and if scale is never actually achieved (remember that for most mobile operators, mobile money is still a much more speculative play than their core business), investment will have been wasted.

Dependencies
No money platform operates entirely in isolation. Every platform has dependencies, and this can cause reliability issues. As an example, if a mobile operator’s SMSC has insufficient capacity at a given second, messages cannot be delivered and transactions cannot be completed.

People

Finally, it’s worth noting that technology is ultimately administered by people (at minimum, people still get to control the on/off switch!) We’ve written at length about the challenges of attempting to scale with a small team, and these challenges are equally relevant when it comes to technology: small problems are multiplied when operators do not have a skilled and experienced hand to liaise with vendors in case of an issue.

February 14, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Women in Development

Benefits and challenges of using Mobile Money to reduce poverty for women in Kenya

This is a guest post by Dr Ndunge Kiiti of Houghton College, New York and the GSMA mWomen programme.

Women using mobile money Over the past seven months, my colleague Dr. Jane Mutinda from Kenyatta University in Kenya and I have been studying how mobile money services impact poverty reduction in rural Eastern Kenya. So far we’ve seen that Safaricom’s mobile money service M-PESA has proved very popular amongst women’s groups and today I’ll be sharing with you insights into this phenomenon, from the research process which included a workshop. The workshop brought together representatives from the women’s groups with M-PESA staff to share thoughts on the benefits and challenges presented by the service and ways users can improve their experience.

Profiles of the Women’s Groups

Gross inequalities exist between men and women in Kenya. These gaps and inequalities are evident in access and control of resources, economic opportunities and power, and political voice. For example, an estimated 95% of all land holdings in Kenya are owned by men,; while women own only 5% (UNDP & UNIFEM, 2005, p. 11). These challenges have translated into high levels of poverty, mainly concentrated among women in rural areas. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Eastern Province of Kenya is one of the poorest regions of the country. Among the many drivers of poverty in this region is lack of information about socio-economic services, rights and obligations is key and this problem especially affects women.

The 21 women’s groups we studied are working on addressing poverty from social, economic, and psychological perspectives. Currently, all the groups have savings accounts (as a group and many as individuals) and some form of financial investments. Additionally, most of the groups continue using the Merry-Go-Round system, a basic example of what Stuart Rutherford (1999) calls the Rotating Savings and Credit Associations or ROSCAs. These are a form of lottery where members save a fixed amount every period (weekly or monthly, for example) and the total amount saved during a given period is given to one member of the association, either based on need or randomly.

From our research, it is clear that mobile money services are central to the success of these groups. Each of the groups uses M-PESA as their main avenue for transactions, as individuals and groups. As one group member put it, “The use of M-PESA has been extremely beneficial to many people.” Many of the group members expressed that they couldn’t imagine not having access to M-PESA as a service.

Benefits of M-PESA

A key reason we found for the service’s popularity was that M-PESA was the initial service introduced to rural areas. Therefore it already serves a large portion of the population that has no access to banking services and clearly builds on the social ties that exist across urban and rural areas in Kenya.

For the women’s group activities, it was clear that M-PESA assists in facilitating group payments, especially for members who might live away from their groups or be traveling during the monthly meetings. For example, although all the groups have their base in the rural areas, some group members live in urban areas because of family commitments or employment opportunities. M-PESA allows them to still contribute to their group although they are not always physically there. As one group mentioned, “People are able to pay their dues on time even if they are not present.” This efficiency is perceived as essential to group planning. “It enables us to plan….what we want to do with that money and whatever we wanted to do is done.”

M-PESA also assists some of the groups with their microfinance transactions, whether they are purchasing or selling a product for their businesses. In one of the group discussions, this was highlighted, “On the side of purchasing goods, it’s like we have been freed from traveling by vehicles. We just send the money and the goods are delivered to us….you have paid for everything including transport.” This was also mentioned in the context of supporting rural businesses. There was strong support for M-PESA as a service that promotes more economic transactions in the rural areas; thus leading to rural development and arguably, the reduction of poverty.

In addition, from a basic usage standpoint, the women emphasized that M-PESA is convenient, safe, accessible, efficient and affordable. The fact that M-PESA creates opportunities for employment was also viewed as a positive aspect of the service. However, there were some challenges in relation to their use of the M-PESA services that the women highlighted. The following were most frequently described.

Challenges

Fraud

Several of the women had lost money to fraud. The most common type of fraud was receiving a call or SMS from an individual who claims they have sent money to your M-PESA account by mistake. They usually request you to send it back to them. One group member explained a personal experience with fraud: “For example, last week I got three SMS messages continuously; same number, one minute between each. They were asking me to confirm that I had received several amounts of money. At the end it said ‘your M-PESA now is eight thousand. And in my phone I knew I had about two thousand. So immediately, I knew ….it was a hoax.”

Network/Connectivity Problems

In rural areas network reception can create challenges. One group member explained the problem they often face, ‘The network is low, so you are told, “there is no network”…..which means today there is no M-PESA. So you find you wanted to send that money quickly but it can’t go because of the network.’ This seems to be a key problem in very remote areas.

Cost

The general cost of M-PESA services seemed to be accepted. The cost issue was mainly highlighted because of the high levels of poverty, especially in rural areas. Even though the service is greatly appreciated for its convenience and security, the charge is often viewed as an additional cost that uses resources that could be used elsewhere. One woman noted the additional cost , “If you send money through the M-PESA to the treasurer [of the women’s group], you should send with the money for removing it.”

Services for Special Populations

Some of the elderly women emphasized that sometimes their main challenge is the inability to read and that often translates to having to give out their personal information, recognizing that it could be used for fraud. This issue was also expressed by the group with members with visual impairments. One of the respondents who lived with sight problems shared her concern: “The phones which are available nowadays, they are not audible, they don’t talk. You can’t operate it in a manner that it can tell you everything, so it’s easy for a person to read for you the wrong money figure that is in the phone account and take a share of what is there.” They made a request to the M-PESA staff, to advocate and push for the development of more products and services that are friendly to special populations.

Group Communication Dynamics

The irony of the M-PESA service is that it can impact group communication and interaction both positively and negatively. On one hand, it allows for money to be sent to facilitate planning at meetings, even if a member needs to be absent. On the other hand, as one member put it, “Many people feel that they can fail to attend the group meetings as long as they send the money.” Most groups charge a fee if monthly contributions are sent late. Thus, most group members would be inclined or motivated to send their payments in on time. M-PESA helps facilitate this. However, some groups argued this can perpetuate the lack of meeting attendance, thus, limiting the social aspects of the group meeting and affecting the socio-psychological support that comes from face to face group interactions.

Although there were numerous challenges mentioned, the groups made it clear that the benefits outweighed the disadvantages, summarized by one respondent: “The positives are more than the negatives.”

Check back next week for the second part of this post.

For a more detailed presentation of their study, please visit the IMTFI Website.

February 9, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Mobile, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Western Cape taxis to use smart cards

The Peninsula Taxi Association (PTA) in the Western Cape will become the first taxi organisation using electronic payments in South Africa.

The Peninsula Taxi Association (PTA) will become the first taxi organisation to use a smart cards system for payment (image: Gateway)

The end of January saw the launch of the Tap-I-Fare card payment system. Five thousand cards were distributed to passengers. These cards are compatible with the MyCiTi bus service and Johannesburg’s Reya Vaya bus service too.

With a fleet of 250 vehicles, the PTA is testing the system on a number of taxis for now. “As a pilot project at the moment, the card system was being implemented in 42 vehicles which ran the city to Victoria & Alfred Waterfront route but would be rolled out to other routes in future. The 42 vehicles had wireless hand-held devices upon which the cards were swiped,” the New Age wrote.

“As the most progressive taxi association in the country, it was always the vision of the PTA to look ahead and pre-empt the ever changing needs of the commuter. This meant that changes had to be made to keep up with the times, and this card payment system was but one option that was explored,” said Ghaalid Behardien, association spokesperson .

The first 1000 passengers to buy a new card will get it at 50% discount, while card holders’ fares from Cape Town central to the V&A Waterfront are reduced by 50c.

Charlie Fripp – Online editor

February 8, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Mobile, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Uganda’s Airtel launches mobile money

Uganda’s Airtel officially launched its mobile money scheme on Tuesday with Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi making the first transaction to a local journalist. The new platform should enable Ugandans to access their real money and convert it to e-money in order to pay bills and accounts, top up mobile credit and receive money across the country’s telecom networks.

Uganda’s Airtel officially launched its mobile money scheme on Tuesday (image: Blogspot)

Mbabazi said that telecom operators in the country are now giving users more options and adding value to their operations, which the PM said would have a “positive social impact and economic growth” for the country, singling out rural areas as having the greatest potential.

Airtel’s launch means the country now has four operators serving mobile money, after MTN, Uganda Telecom and Warid Telecom already had launched their services.

Airtel Uganda Managing Director, V.G Somasekhar told guests that the company invested sh300-million ($130 608) to upgrade its network services at 300 sites countrywide.

He said this enabled at least 1.5-million more customers to be accessed, bringing its total customer base to 4-million.

Andrew Matapare

February 2, 2012/by actualize