Financial Inclusion

Natasha is a young woman who has a cake baking business on the outskirts of Nairobi. She has a bank account for her business which she uses intensively. Natasha’s business was doing well and she needed a loan to expand.

Combining education, apprenticeship, and start-up capital to surmount barriers and transform trajectories 

On the 5th of September 2019, the Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), held a stakeholder validation workshop in Nairobi, where they presented the findings of a research study that identified seven key financially underserved segments of the Kenyan population and discussed the potentially viable business cases and policy implications that financial market players could tap into.

Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya is pleased to announce that Anzetse Were has joined the team as Economist, effective September 2019.

In April 2019, the 2019 FinAccess Household Survey revealed that Kenya had made extraordinary strides in financial inclusion. While FinAccess 2019 shows that financial inclusion has peaked at 83% among Kenyans, its findings also evoke poignant questions.

As I reflect on my first month leading FSD Kenya, I am struck by both the challenges we face as well as the opportunities we can seize to truly create value through inclusive finance in Kenya.

Kenya aims to become a middle-income country by 2030, delivering a high quality of life to all. Finance plays a central role in our economy, facilitating trade and underpinning the efficient pooling and allocation of resources and risk.

Education presents an opportunity for poor households to break out of the poverty cycle in future. What are some of the interventions and finance solutions that have made a difference in education finance?

Education is the top priority for Kenyans according to FinAccess Household Survey 2019. Poor households particularly attach high value to educating their children.

FinAccess 2019 was launched last week by the Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya.  The results from this national household survey provide a comprehensive and authoritative picture of the retail financial services sector in Kenya.

The Central Bank of Kenya in collaboration with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) have launched the Financial Access (FinAccess) Household Survey 2019 on 3rd April 2019.

This Financial Access (dubbed FinAccess) Household Survey 2019 is the fifth in a series of surveys that measure and track developments and dynamics in the financial inclusion landscape in Kenya from the demand–side.

Financial Sector Deepening-Kenya is proud to be a supporting partner of Dignity and Debt‘s project that involves the use of AI to marshal citizen voices about their experiences with digital credit.

The 2016 FinAccess household survey has been cited in a recently published academic journal. Access and view the journal article via the link below.

For us, Fintech only matters if it is helping Kenyans solve real-world problems or seize genuine opportunities.

A presentation and panel discussion by FSD Kenya on tech-enabled lending in Africa.

Throughout this blog series I have examined FSD Kenya’s Building Livelihoods programme from an identity perspective. I have shown how the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP) creates valued identities in the community and how there are different pathways to savings group identification and value.

The role of community-based facilitators (CBFs) is to encourage participation in savings groups, ensure groups function effectively, and provide training on basic financial and business skills, as well as prepare participants for formal loans.

Over the past two years I have travelled to Marsabit County in Northern Kenya four times to talk to the same 50 people about their lives and experiences as participants of FSD Kenya’s Building Livelihoods programme. The programme aims to help participants develop sustainable livelihoods through business.

Where there is already a strong value associated with savings groups, people are likely to more rapidly join, participate more fully, and exemplify what it means to be a member of the group.

FSD Kenya’s Building Livelihoods programme is a market-based adaptation of the Graduation approach popularised by BRAC in Bangladesh. Over a period of two years, participants shared stories about their lives and early experiences with the programme giving insight into who they are and how they think and change throughout the programme.

FSD Kenya carries out research excursions across the country to obtain perspectives of ordinary Kenyans regarding finance, financial services and how the financial system has impacted their livelihoods.

On 30th June 2017, M-Akiba, a Kenyan government bond sold through the mobile phone, was launched.

After many years, the involvement of many partners and many iterations, M-Akiba, a Kenyan government bond sold through the mobile phone, was launched in 2017.

Today, mobile money has managed to penetrate over 70% of the Kenyan population, with more people claiming access to services such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa than ever before.

Financial access is accelerating

Financial inclusion is growing, and fast. Kenyans excluded from any form of financial service dropped from over 40% of adults to 17% between 2006 and 2016.

Financial services associations (FSAs) are rural community-level member based semi-informal financial institutions, that are a hybrid of savings and credit cooperative organizations (SACCOs) and microfinance institutions (MFIs).

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.