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When Digital Payment Goes Viral: Lessons from COVID-19’s Impact on Mobile Money in Rwanda
Cash can help spread COVID-19, so some African countries have ramped up efforts to expand digital payments to fight the virus. According to Isabelle Carboni and Hennie Bester at Cenfri, this imperative to digitize is one of the key opportunities to emerge from the pandemic. They explore the early experiences of Rwanda, in assessing the impact these efforts can have.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Finance
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Google and Gates Foundation to Help Spread Digital Payments in Developing Countries
The initiative would help tie together a growing array of digital financial services.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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South Sudan’s M-Gurush Joins Mobile Money Remittance Business
The launch of this remittance service comes at a time where digital money transfer services such as mobile money and electronic banking are being supported by various governments as a way to curb the spread of COVID-19.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Why COVID-19 Could Delay Interswitch, Africa’s Next Big IPO
The tech firm’s path from startup to IPO aspirant traces back to the vision of founder Mitchell Elegbe, a Nigerian electrical engineering graduate whose entire career has pretty much been Interswitch.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Visa and Kenya’s Safaricom Partner on M-Pesa, Payments and Tech
The arrangement opens to M-Pesa’s own extensive financial services network in East Africa Visa’s global merchant and card network across 200 countries.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Mobile Money Interoperability in Ghana Goes up by Over 350% in the First Quarter of 2020
The money transfer across different mobile networks, which is referred to as Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI), has increased by 358% in the first quarter of 2020.
- Categories
- Finance, Telecommunications
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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The Informal Economy is Complicating Government Responses to COVID-19: Will the Crisis Push Millions Toward Formality?
As COVID-19 devastates the global economy, many governments have designed support measures to help businesses and workers survive. But as Jill Lagos Shemin and James Dailey point out, this support may be ineffective in lower-income countries, where most small businesses and their employees work in the informal economy, lacking bank accounts and even valid ID. They explore some solutions governments can pursue – and trade-offs they will have to accept.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Finance
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Safaricom, Vodacom Acquire M-PESA Payments Platform
“Our joint venture will allow Vodacom and Safaricom to drive the next generation of the M-PESA platform, an intelligent, cloud-based platform for the smartphone age. It will also help us to promote greater financial inclusion and help bridge the digital divide within the communities in which we operate.”
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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