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Mukuru enables our customers to move money around the world. We use the latest mobile and web-based technologies to deliver the safest and most efficient experience possible. But that’s just half the story. To really understand us, you need to know the why behind all we do. We exist as a remittances business to empower migrants typically excluded from mainstream financial services, to move money in a convenient, safe and affordable way. We know that every customer has a story; just as we do. So whether sending money home for school fees, the purchasing of seeds and farming equipment, hospital bills, rent or groceries, we are passionate about making each story end well.

Mukuru enables our customers to move money around the world. We use the latest mobile and web-based technologies to deliver the safest and most efficient experience possible. But that’s just half the story. To really understand us, you need to know the why behind all we do. We exist as a remittances business to empower migrants typically excluded from mainstream financial services, to move money in a convenient, safe and affordable way. We know that every customer has a story; just as we do. So whether sending money home for school fees, the purchasing of seeds and farming equipment, hospital bills, rent or groceries, we are passionate about making each story end well.

“Know Your Customer” - or KYC - is a verification process in the financial industry. If you have ever opened a bank account or applied for insurance, then you have been a subject to KYC checks. All regulated financial companies are responsible for building their KYC checks based on global and national anti-money laundering standards. This way, companies can make sure that it’s a suitable verification process for their customers, services and industry. If customers can’t provide any formal identification, or if it is difficult to authenticate it, companies can’t easily identify them and offer them their services. 

"We can see the government taking steps toward accepting the sector's needs," said Zewdu Assefa, vice president of BelCash Technology. "Regardless, the sector needs a wider definition, for instance for trade license registrations."Ethiopia has not yet undergone a cybersecurity assessment, according to the strategy document."Without having done an assessment explicitly for Ethiopia," reads the document, "it's difficult to identify the most important vulnerabilities."

M-Pesa permet aux détenteurs de mobiles d’effectuer toutes sortes d’achats en un claquement de doigts. Qu’il s’agisse de régler ses factures d’électricité, de rembourser ses frais de scolarité, de réserver des billets d’avions ou tickets de bus ou encore de faire ses emplettes alimentaires, M-Pesa est aujourd’hui devenu un acteur économique incontournable au Kenya depuis sa création en 2007

M-Pesa, joyau de l’opérateur national kényan Safaricom (détenu à 40% par Vodafone), regarde maintenant vers les marchés du Nord, et notamment vers l’Europe de l’Est, à commencer par la Roumanie : pays où la grande majorité de la population est connectée (possède au moins un téléphone mobile) mais pas totalement bancarisée.

STARTUP WATCH- Fawry is officially Egypt’s first unicorn: EGX-listed e-payments firm Fawry became the first Egyptian tech company to hit a market cap of USD 1 bn on Monday after its share price reached intraday highs of EGP 22.69, former managing director Mohamed Okasha announced in a LinkedIn post. Fawry’s share price has increased by more than 300% since it debuted on the EGX last year, a rise that has accelerated in recent months as the use of its payment services skyrocketed during the lockdown.

Bisharo’s story is one of the many urban merchants who have discovered the power of digital payments for their businesses. Over the past few years, technology providers such as BelCash with their HelloCash mobile money, product working closely with the Somali Microfinance Institution, have made significant progress in helping merchants like Bisharo realize the benefits of digitizing payments.

M-PESA was cheaper than banks, and safer and more convenient than handling cash. The financial inclusion driven by M-PESA has greatly led to the growth of Kenya’s digital economy.

M-PESA”: that is a name in global fintech history that can never be erased. Not that anybody would want to. Forever it will be the perfect example of a viable financial ecosystem based on rules unthinkable before

“The digital nature of the product can be seen as exacerbating the usual challenges of ICT illiteracy. However, FarmDrive presents the record-keeping platform in different languages  – it’s now available in English and Kiswahili – via a simple SMS to increase the uptake of record-keeping among rural farmers. So farmers don’t have to have a smartphone,” Bosire says.“It also emerged during our pilot that farmers feel more empowered if they can their mobile phones for other activities apart from for calling, texting and mobile money. Their openness to  embracing new ways of using their simple mobile phones to solve challenges is what drives the culture shift from keeping non-organized farm records on paper or none at all  to digital record keeping,” she says.

Stock trading app Thndr has completed its registration with the EGX, the company announced on its website. The no-commission equities trading platform last month became Egypt’s first company to obtain a new brokerage license since 2008.

BCTS has successfully implemented its HelloCash mobile banking platform and 8 000 agents network with 6 local banks and 2 microfinance institutions, making it the largest financial network in the country.This achievement has gained recognition from the UN initiative for financial inclusion, which was substantiated by the visit of UN ambassador for financial inclusion, her Royal Majesty Queen Maxima of the Netherlands in May 2019.

With 17 strong through partnerships, across multiple sectors and an ownership structure in full compliance with the Ethiopian regulations, BelCash Payments-As-A-Platform model spurred numerous “HelloServices”. These services include airtime eTop-up, Pay-As-You-Go solar, Healthcare, eCommerce, Jobs, Entertainment, and many more, providing the Ethiopian population access to essential services through the HelloCash platform and agents network.

BelCash Technology Solutions Ltd. (BCTS) was established in Ethiopia in 2011, as a registered Value-Added Service (VAS) . It'main activity is to provides its digital technology platforms to businesses as a service (PaaS).

Since 2017, AgroCenta has successfully completed two rounds of funding to the tune of $750,000 to expand operations in Ghana. In 2017, AgroCenta won the Seedstars Global Competition against other 72 startups from emerging markets across the globe. AgroCenta has grown its farmer base to 45,000 providing additional services of access to finance for smallholder farmers, bringing smallholder farmers onto the financial sector to enjoy services such as crop insurance, micro lending/input financing, mobile payments through mobile money and finally pensions schemes targeted at farmers and beneficiaries in the informal sector with special attention to women and youth. Since 2017, AgroCenta has helped over 28,000 farmers sell over 20,000MT of commodities to large, medium and small scale buyers across the country.   In December 2018, AgroCenta won a grant of $250,000 from GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Fund to further build its financial inclusion platform AgroPay targeted at rural smallholder farmers.

Hailed as the “Kenyan technology success story”, many have claimed M-PESA to be a testimony to the greatness of the East African country’s technology scene, producing world-class technology companies that rival those in South Africa. However, is the acclaimed mobile money service really Kenyan at all? The answer is no. M-PESA is British.

By any stretch of the currently available facts, the service that accounts for more than 60 percent of Kenya’s GDP in transactions was conceived by British professionals. The company commissioned with developing the idea, Sagentia, into a workable technology was British. Additionally, the company that owns the intellectual property rights to the idea, Vodafone, is British and, lastly, it was funded in its initial stages by the British Government.

Nyagaka Anyona Ouko, a Kenyan from Nairobi, claims he is the innovator of M-Pesa and claims that Vodafone and its representatives stole the idea of Mobile Cash Transfer from him.

Mukuru helps you move money around Africa. Sending cash for instant collection or topping up a bank account or mobile wallet, has never been easier.

We exist as a remittances company, to empower migrants to move money in a convenient, safe and affordable manner. These workers, who would usually be excluded from mainstream financial services, can now fulfill their desire to improve their own and their families’ lives.

It is this, the opportunity to enrich the lives of Africa’s people by helping family, friends and loved ones stay connected, that motivates us to improve, to do more and to reach further. To us, a remittance is more than money. It represents the love, care and hard work of the sender and can be a lifeline, an opportunity or even a celebration to the recipient.

Customers who sign up for the M-Pesa service can convert between e-cash and real cash (these are called cash-in / cash-out transactions), and can transfer e-cash from their account to that of another account holder via SMS.

And finally in Kiva's defense, its behavior is emblematic of fund-raising in microfinance and charity generally, and is ultimately traceable to human foibles. People donate in part because it makes them feel good. Giving the beneficiary a face and constructing a story for her in which the donor helps write the next chapter opens purses. The pleasure of giving

Kiva is the path-breaking, fast-growing person-to-person microlending site. It works this way: Kiva posts pictures and stories of people needing loans. You give your money to Kiva. Kiva sends it to a microlender. The lender makes the loan to a person you choose. He or she ordinarily repays. You get your money back with no interest. It's like eBay for microcredit.

You knew that, right? Well guess what: you're wrong, and so is Kiva's diagram. Less that 5% of Kiva loans are disbursed after they are listed and funded on Kiva's site. Just today, for example, Kiva listed a loan fepor Phong Mut in Cambodia and at this writing only $25 of the needed $800 has been raised. But you needn't worry about whether Phong Mut will get the loan because it was disbursed last month. And if she defaults, you might not hear about it: the intermediating microlender MAXIMA might cover for her in order to keep its Kiva-listed repayment rate high.

Fawry gets CBE nod to partner with state-owned bank for transfer service: E-payments platform Fawry has received preliminary approval from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) to set up a bank transfer service for Egyptian expats; the service will be offered in partnership with an unnamed state-owned bank, CEO Ashraf Sabry tells Al Mal. Fawry has been in talks with several local and regional banks — including the National Bank of Egypt (NBE), Bank of Alexandria, Banque du Caire, and ADIB — to set up the remittances service for Egyptians living in the Gulf since last year, former managing director Mohamed Okasha said in December, saying at the time that the service would initially be rolled out in the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Remittances, particularly from expats in the GCC, are a key source of foreign currency for Egypt and helped to narrow its current account deficit through the worst of the pandemic in 3Q2019-2020.

Drawing on the existing knowledge of African development from previous publications, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent takes an in-depth look at 26 economic and social development successes in Sub-Saharan African countries?twenty from individual countries and six that cut across the region. These stories manifest at the project, provincial, sub-national, national, or regional level and across themes, programs, and sectors. The book aims to address how Sub-Saharan African countries have overcome major development challenges. The main components of each case study include: (i) a description of the achievement and the elements that qualify the outcome as successful; (ii) an assessment of the main policies, interventions, actions, and other factors that contributed to the positive outcome; (iii) a presentation of the lessons learned and the contribution to the discourse on African development; and (iv) insights on the usability or applicability of the achievement in terms of the potential for scaling up the interventions and actions. Individual case studies also examine the role of the key stakeholders?the government, donors, or private investors?in facilitating and promoting the achievement. The studies are classified into four categories: overcoming or avoiding massive government failure, rebuilding or creating a government, rationalizing government involvement in markets, and listening to the people.

In the year 2000, we began the Safaricom journey with a view to Transform Lives. Safaricom is one of a small group of about 400 companies across Africa whose annual revenues are more than $1 billion. Many of these companies are pan-African in their operations and are active in increasingly diverse sectors.

M-PESA is restoring dignity to thousands of refugees. Through a partnership with the World Food Programme, we are leveraging M-PESA to help more refugees access food, through a product known as Chakula Chap Chap. M-PESA has enabled us to digitize food delivery for over 100,000 households. It has removed the opportunity for corruption by eliminating middle-men, and reduced the cost of distributing relief aid, creating employment and business opportunities for people in refugee camps. This initiative has shown us that our business can help bridge critical gaps for our society.

In the year 2000, we began the Safaricom journey with a view to Transform Lives. Safaricom is one of a small group of about 400 companies across Africa whose annual revenues are more than $1 billion. Many of these companies are pan-African in their operations and are active in increasingly diverse sectors.

the popular mobile money transfer program, came to be in Kenya. It’s narrated by Michael Joseph, the managing director of mobile money at Vodafone and the program’s founder.

The animation was produced as part of a series of online courses designed and delivered by the USAID Mobile Solutions Team, QED, and TechChange, a DC-based organization that specializes in online training for international development.