One of the key reasons why banks are challenged in serving SMEs appropriately, is that they lack an understanding of the evolving needs of fast growing SMEs.

How exactly do financial services impact low income Kenyans? In this note, we extract the stories of eight respondent households from the Financial Diaries.

Self-employment is a major source of income for low income Kenyans, and Financial Diaries respondents are no exception. When we talked to respondents in 2015, two years after the close of the original Diaries, those whose economic lives were improving pointed to business returns as one of the main drivers of their success.

Credit information sharing arrangements (‘CIS’) have emerged worldwide as an effective mechanism to improve access to credit by reducing information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders and improving the quality of credit assessments made by lenders. Since 2009, Credit Information Sharing Association of Kenya (‘CIS Kenya’) has been developing the system of credit information sharing in Kenya.

In late 2015, we followed up with Financial Diaries households to check in on their economic lives two years after the initial Diaries study ended. We wanted to know how they are doing now, the factors driving changes in their economic lives, and the role that financial services and financial choices were playing in their economic trajectories.

This report draws on Financial Diaries data from India, Kenya, and Mexico to enhance the field’s understanding of women’s financial lives, and to highlight provider-led opportunities to better serve this important market segment.

Enthusiasm around the once-popular “Africa Rising” narrative is abating in the face of slower-than-expected growth, macro volatility deriving from continued reliance on raw material exports in many countries, and the reality of persistently high inequality.

23% of sub-Saharan Africans are living in “cusper” households that get by on $2-$5 per person per day. This map shows their total percentage per country (relative to the overall country population) and size in millions

Beneath the surface of many of the disruptive applications we use everyday is a growing web of APIs – application program interfaces that enable applications to “talk” to one another.

This toolkit has been designed to help you generate solutions in many different fields of interest, from agriculture, to manufacturing, to banking and new technology.

Kenya is seen widely as a ‘stand out’ success story on financial inclusion. The ten-year period from 2005 to 2015 witnessed enormous change in the financial sector.

This reports gives an overview of the major issues surrounding financial inclusion during 2015 and highlights 10 of our initiatives.

While Safaricom’s M-PESA platform stole the spotlight for being one of the world’s most transformative financial services, a somewhat hushed storm is infusing in the world of API’s in Kenya since Safaricom’s September-2015 announcement   that they have opened up their APIs to the public.