GSMA | Mobile for Development

Making the connection between mobile money and climate change

Climate change has rapidly become a concern for central banks, financial regulators, and ministries of finance. In September 2017, AFI member institutions formulated the Sharm El Sheikh Accord on Financial Inclusion, Climate Change and Green Finance, which sets commitments ...

Social commerce: blurring the line between social interaction and online shopping

The global spread of social media coupled with the rapid growth of e-commerce is giving rise to a new trend where content sharing, messaging and payments converge. Social commerce—the use of social interactions combined with the transactional nature of e-commerce—has led to ...

Learning by seeing and doing: How our field trip to Indonesia is stretching our thinking on all things payments

Earlier this year, we published a paper exploring the potential pathways for evolving the mobile money business model. With internet and smartphone penetration in emerging markets at an all-time high, the paper seeks to clearly articulate how mobile money providers can adapt ...

Financial Inclusion Week 2019: Unleashing the power of mobile money to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

Each year Financial Inclusion Week convenes organisations from around the world into a global conversation exploring the progress made and the remaining challenges to building a more inclusive financial ecosystem. This year we explored the theme of “Financial Inclusion: For ...

The GSMA’s Instant Payment Notification (IPN) Hub is transitioning to the industry

The GSMA created the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) Hub as an industry utility to enable pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar providers, and other pre-paid utility service providers (e.g. energy, water and sanitation), to integrate more easily with mobile money operators across ...

Mobile money: A product of choice for women to send and receive remittances

Earlier this year, I had the privilege to participate in an International Experts Roundtable in Rome on the topic of “Women’s financial inclusion and the role of remittances”. This roundtable marked the occasion of the United Nations International Day of Family Remittances ...

The promise of mobile money for further advancing women’s financial inclusion

The findings of this blog are based on Findex 2017 microdata released in October 2018. In this blog, we discuss the role of mobile money in driving financial inclusion, particularly for women. Mobile money has the potential to close the gender gap in account ownership Since ...

Introducing the GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab: a testing ground for transformative digital innovations

In developed and developing markets alike, societies are becoming increasingly digital, and technological innovations are emerging at an ever increasing rate. The mobile money industry is now fast evolving against a backdrop of increased internet access and smartphone ...

Cybersecurity: A governance framework for mobile money providers

The GSMA Mobile Money team, at the Mobile 360 – Africa regional event, held a side session on ‘Cybersecurity and cross border data flows in the mobile industry.’ The session was well attended with representatives from the industry, regulators and policy makers. The ...

How to combine monitoring, evaluation and learning data in commercial product development

What is our MEL framework? In the early phases of service design, the key objective is to identify the myriad of challenges (pain points) that various stakeholders experience, including farmers and other actors in the value chain (field clerks, agribusiness office staff, ...

Digital identity opportunity in mobile-enabled social benefits programmes

Mobile technologies offer SCT and similar social benefits programmes a way to greatly reduce operational costs, so that donor funds can more effectively reach a larger number of beneficiaries. Here are two areas where adoption of mobile technology in social programmes can be ...

Accelerating PAYG utilities in five markets through the IPN Hub

The Instant Payment Notification (IPN) Hub is an industry utility created by the GSMA to enable ecosystem players to integrate more easily with mobile money operators – bringing fundamental utility services (such as electricity, water and sanitation) to off-grid populations. ...

The pivotal role of mobile money agents in driving financial inclusion

For more than a decade agent distribution networks have been at the heart of successful mobile money services. Responsible for converting physical cash to digital value, and performing crucial tasks such as on-boarding, supporting and educating millions of customers on a ...

Mobile money adoption strategies for start-ups in emerging markets

With more than 866 million registered mobile money accounts globally and $1.3 billion processed daily, mobile money serves as a critical infrastructure for start-ups looking to increase digital payment adoption among their customers. Inspired by this, the GSMA Ecosystem ...

Improving utility services through partnerships and digitisation: Learnings from our Mobile Operator Roundtable

On 15 July, ahead of the GSMA’s Mobile 360 – Africa event in Kigali, the Mobile for Development (M4D) Utilities programme hosted a roundtable with over 20 participants representing 10 organisations, including mobile operators and utility providers of energy, water and ...

1Service: Digitising bill payments for piped water users in peri-urban Bangladesh

With an area of 32 square kilometres and population of 153,000, Satkhira Municipality is one of the oldest local government institutions in the Southern part of Bangladesh, established in 1869. Situated in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, the southwest coastal region of ...

A spotlight on Libra – Part I: Assessing the true potential of Libra’s financial inclusion objectives

In June 2019, Facebook announced the launch of Libra, a digital currency based on a new decentralised blockchain, backed by a reserve of real fiat currencies guaranteeing built-in low volatility. In this first blog of a series exploring Libra, we will assess Libra’s ...

The GSMA Mobile Money Certification: a global tool to counter “de-risking”

At both the macro and micro level, the social and economic impact of international remittances in developing countries is well documented. In 2018, the value of global remittance flows increased to $689 billion, of which $529 billion was to developing countries. In 2019, ...

Highlights from the 2019 Mobile Money Leadership Forum

The GSMA Mobile Money team were delighted to return to Kigali, Rwanda’s bustling capital, for the 2019 Mobile 360 – Africa event, which convened a record-breaking 1000 delegates from 59 countries. Mobile money and financial inclusion were prominent themes throughout the ...

Sub-Saharan Africa: The enduring epicentre of mobile money – Part 2

This blog is the second in a two-part series on the State of Mobile Money in Sub-Saharan Africa. In our last post, we explored mobile money as the driving force for financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the increasing digitisation of use cases across different ...

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