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Kenyan startup, Abacus, in partnership with Strathmore University, is organising the Abacus Investment Academy to train individuals who want to learn more about financial markets. The program will take place at the Strathmore Business School in Nairobi and participants will be guided on how to invest in the different sectors and what to look out for before investing.

Each and every transaction done on the M-PESA platform is electronic and can therefore be monitored by Safaricom, which runs its own bank-grade anti-money laundering system. Even a cash-in or a cash-out operation has an electronic leg and is captured by the system. The Central Bank of Kenya gets regular reports on M-PESA transactions, as it does from other payment service providers.

Cash merchants are mainly super users, who resell their own working capital balances, with no more access to the M-PESA platform than any other customers, except that they have higher transaction limits.

Our Cropchain and LendIt platforms solve these two problems. Cropchain is our user-friendly integrated agricultural supply chain management platform that allows organizations to manage everything in the agricultural supply chain from outgrower schemes, logistics, traceability to digital trading, quality assurance and data analytics. LendIt, our financial inclusion platform enables farmers access digital services such mobile money payments for commodities sold, micro-lending/input financing, crop insurance and pension scheme for the informal sector.

Our Cropchain and LendIt platforms solve these two problems. Cropchain is our user-friendly integrated agricultural supply chain management platform that allows organizations to manage everything in the agricultural supply chain from outgrower schemes, logistics, traceability to digital trading, quality assurance and data analytics. LendIt, our financial inclusion platform enables farmers access digital services such mobile money payments for commodities sold, micro-lending/input financing, crop insurance and pension scheme for the informal sector.

Onboarding smallholder farmers onto the AgroCenta platform. Agents visit communities where smallholder farmers who deal in sorghum, rice, maize, millet and soybean are registered onto the AgroCenta platform to trade. Agents also work with farmer based organizations (FBOs) to carry out trading activities. 2 Facilitating trade deals on behalf of Smallholder farmers. Agents deal with buyers who wish to purchase directly from smallholder farmers. AgroCenta agents are trained in the field of technology, sales and marketing to effectively help smallholder farmers who have little or no knowledge of technology trade easily. 3 Gathering market information and statistical data. Agents are assigned to major trading markets across the country to collate data on market pricing for various commodities. This information is relayed to smallholder farmers via Voice technologies in languages they read and understand.

Hellomarket will be the platform used for local transactions, enabling buyers to order, deliver and pay for goods through electronic banking services. Belcash has signed an agreement with DHL Express, a Germany company, for logistics services.

For buyers abroad, Belcash introduced Helloshop, a platform that allows domestic products to be ordered through the firm’s portal and the payment to be processed through Mastercard Payment Gateway Services.

“This will make foreign currency flow through the proper channels to local banks,” said Zewdu Assefa, deputy CEO of Belcash Ethiopia. “The seller receives the Birr equivalent of the amount earned in foreign currency.”

The banks and financial institutions are happy to use the advantages of secure storage, interoperability, scalability, and 24/7 uptime without heavy investments. This also means that scaling your business to higher user demand is much easier due to the fact that it only takes upgrading the data package that the company is contracted to use. No need to hire, train, and re-train any employees.

We want to acceleratefinancial inclusion BezoMoney is not just a product. It is a growth experience. Our vision is to become Africa’s largest community-based digital financial institution by empowering people financially through their way of life to facilitate upward social mobility using digital financial technologies. We are community, we are a financial ecosystem and we exist to address all your financial needs.

We had the opportunity to be trained by Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) which allowed us to develop our skills and our product as well as secure seed funding for BezoMoney.

he “Kiva.org: Crowd-Sourced Microfinance and Lending Team Cooperative Behavior” study focuses on evaluating the extent to which Solidarity as a design-lever impacts social behavior. Looking specifically at Kiva.org as a prominent community for peer-to-peer lending, this study seeks to evaluate the advent of “Lending Teams,” their subsequent impact on group lending behavior, and the extent to which group openness, size, and categorization substantively alters online cooperative behavior.

AgroCenta has hosted and provided over 500 farmer engagement sessions and trainings since launch. Skilled professionals deliver these sessions in farming communities and methodologies are continuously updated to reflect state-of-theart farming practices.

Despite robust financial subsidies, many programs have found that selling insurance to poor African farmers is extremely challenging. This remains the case even when risk products are bundled with other services, such as community savings programs and training in how to improve crop yields. For instance, a 10-year-old government farm insurance program in Ghana has fallen far short of expectations, according to multiple observers—including the same Christopher Udry who inspired Sheehan to create WorldCover. Udry and colleagues reported in a March 2019 paper that the government insurance program had had little meaningful impact. In Kenya and Ethiopia, risk transfer programs aimed at pastoralists have had disappointing results, according to an extensively researched June 2019 article in Devex, which was underwritten by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation. Experts point to two main types of obstacles. First, there are enormous marketing and logistical challenges inherent in trying to sell small insurance policies to very poor farmers who’ve never heard of the concept, live in remote areas and may only speak indigenous languages. Second, it’s difficult to build customer loyalty for an abstract product that often doesn’t provide what farmers expect. The Devex story describes how some pastoralists thought they were putting money into a savings account. When they didn’t get their premiums back, “they start[ed] thinking that this product has failed them,” a coordinator said.

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.

Heya- fawry is an initiative in collaboration with arab women enterprise fund, Baheya, AXA and unilever to empower women, increase their opportunities in the financial market and help them to climb up the financial inclusion pyramid in Egypt Fawry as the leading e-payment network in Egypt is supporting poor and disadvantaged women by training them to become Heya fawry-agents, providing POS machines offering them complementary micro-insurance coverage. Ultimately, this initiative will allow poor unbanked women to have access to life-enhancing financial services (mobile top-ups, bill payments, money transfers, microloan payments, as well as essential nutrition and healthcare goods) directly via their nearest Fawry’s agents to raise income for them and their families and to enhance the well-being of the society. Fawry’s main aim is “to ensure that women access our services in the same extent as men do”

A quiet but exciting revolution in surgery has been gaining ground in hospitals in the more advanced nations of the world. Robots, controlled by highly trained operators, have been very effectively carrying out a multitude of operations. Could robot-assisted surgery be the solution Africa has been waiting for in order to be able to deal with the hugecurrent unmet demand?