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Mastercard and USAID Partner to Launch ‘Project Kirana’ for Women Entrepreneurs
The project aims to build financial and digital literacy and improve basic business management skills to help women become successful kirana entrepreneurs.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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YC-Backed Cashfree Raises $35.3 Million for Its Payments Platform
Cashfree, an Indian startup that offers a wide-range of payments services to businesses, has raised $35.3 million in a new financing round as the profitable firm looks to broaden its offering.
- Categories
- Finance, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Making Bank Accounts Work for Women: Lessons on Designing Gender-Centric Financial Services
Papua New Guinea has the highest gender gap in financial inclusion in the Pacific region, with women 29% less likely to have access to formal financial services. Akhand Tiwari and Moinuddin Mohammed at MicroSave (MSC) explore how MiBank, a local micro-bank, has boosted women's inclusion through gender-centric product design and outreach strategies – and what other providers can learn from their success.
- Categories
- Finance
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Data in Real Time: How Digitalisation is Transforming Financial Policies in Africa
For the past year, Cenfri and Finmark Trust have been partnering with NextBillion to share insights from their Insight2Impact (i2i) initiative, a five-year program that has sought to improve financial inclusion and related public policies through the smarter use of data. As the Openi2i Series concludes, i2i lead Hennie Bester takes a look back at the program and the learnings it has generated. In this interview, he explores how digitalisation and data are transforming the policy landscape in Africa and beyond.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Arisaig Seeks To Maximise Impact ‘Bang for Buck’ With New Next Generation Emerging Markets Fund
Arisaig Partners made a bold foray into impact investing in emerging markets by launching its new public equities fund, the Next Generation Fund, in early September.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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M-Pesa Revenue Dip in Kenya Is Beyond Mobile Money Fee Waivers
While it’s logically a good move putting the health and the wellbeing of people first, this single directive is found to have also caused a significant dip in revenue for Kenya’s dominant mobile money service, M-Pesa, and by extension, the country’s leading telco, Safaricom, took a hit.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Mastercard, Juvo Team up To Help Underbanked Build Credit in LATAM, Caribbean
Mastercard is teaming up with FinTech startup Juvo to help the “underbanked” in Latin America and the Caribbean to build credit histories so they can engage in a wider range of financial services.
- Region
- Latin America
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Digitisation of Remittances Can Support Africa’s Economic Recovery
Across the continent, where tourism and hospitality have come to a grinding halt, thousands of jobs have been lost in both the formal and informal sectors. Amidst this gloomy narrative, a shining light has been the formidable resilience of remittance flows into African markets after the initial shock of the pandemic and national lockdowns.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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