Over 250 policymakers, industry players, regulators, lecturers, students, financial sector analysts, development practitioners and other guests gathered at the National Museum’s Louis Leakey Auditorium on Thursday 9th February 2017 for the 3rd FSD Kenya annual lecture on financial inclusion.

Diversification of risk, not putting your eggs in one basket, hustling – whichever word or phrase you use, Robert, a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) rider, embodies this spirit.

Find out what percentage of adults are using a range of formal and informal financial services and products in Kenya, overall and for sub-groups of the population defined by age, gender, wealth, geographic location and education.

Which financial services are perceived to be the most important to Kenyans, and why? This interactive heat map draws from the 2016 FinAccess household survey and displays the percentage of people using a range of financial services

Who are the users of different financial products & services?

The telecom sector in Kenya has experienced phenomenal growth over the past decade. Mobile phone penetration has topped 90%, with 78% of Kenyan adults now owning a working mobile phone.

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.

At 29, Annette is already a widow.  When we met her, she lived in a rented house now near a shopping centre along the main road in Vihiga.  Her in-laws were never very fond of her, and after her husband’s death they chased her off the land where the two were living.

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

Duncan was born in the rural community in Vihiga where he still lives today.  His father died when he was six years old.  His mother struggled to take care of her children alone.  Because of that financial pressure, Duncan did not go to high school and instead began working from a young age.

For Lucy, the trouble started early.  As exams approached at the end of primary school, her parents were fighting.  Her father was drinking a lot and had a number of mistresses.  They quarreled openly; nothing was normal at home.

Matthew has been a hustler for as long as he can remember.  He did well in primary school and wanted to go on to a good secondary school.  But, his mother at home was paralyzed and couldn’t work.  His father, he says, “Is just a farmer, you know.  He doesn’t take this issue of school seriously.” 

Henry, one of eight children, was only able to go to school until form two, the second year of secondary school, when his parents had to pull him out because they could no longer afford the fees. 

Janet and Joseph have been together for 50 years.  Janet had been in school up to class seven, when she dropped out, pregnant with their first child.  She was eighteen years old.  They stayed together at Joseph’s rural home for a few years until he decided to move to Kericho and look for work. 

Compared to most households in her community in Makueni, Magdalene has been doing pretty well.  She earned most of her income in the Diaries from selling clothes on market days around the county. 

Ernest grew up in a rural area in Kenya’s Central region and help from family enabled him to move to Nairobi for accounting studies in 1998 after finishing high school.  He completed Certified Public Accounting training up to section four, but found it hard to get a job.  In 2003, he found himself desperate. 

This is the second post in a three-post blog series introducing publications from our recently concluded Kenya Financial Diaries update study, conducted with BFA.

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.

Our third “Field Friday” exercise reveals lessons for formal financial service providers to learn from informal services.

Over the next three weeks, we will be releasing three publications based on findings from the Kenya Financial Diaries Update, a follow up study with the Kenya Financial Diaries households.

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.

While both Kenya and Tanzania registered fast uptake of digital credit, a new study by FSD Kenya and CGAP with almost 8000 individuals found considerable differences as well as similarities in the adoption and use of digital credit in the two countries.

How the use of non-financial services can help bankers deliver effective financing.

Poor communication between entrepreneurs and their bankers is often a stumbling block in the delivery of effective financing for enterprise growth throughout the world. The use of non-financial services (NFS) can help with this.

Can digital innovations replicate the “three-padlock” concept of the money box?

Financial institutions play a key role in enhancing trust in the financial system

David Ferrand, Director of FSD Kenya, was part of a distinguished panel disucssing the role of central banks in financial inclusion at the CBK@50 symposium in Nairobi.

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