Globally, fifty-six percent of the unbanked adults are women. In Kenya, the situation is similar. More women are unbanked, in comparison to men. Various steps have been undertaken to address the financial exclusion of women, and though the gender gap has been narrowing over time, it persists.

In 2019, FSD Kenya and Turaco – a Kenyan microinsurtech startup providing simple, low-cost health and life insurance products to emerging market consumers – collaborated on a three-month pilot project in with a leading digital lender in Kenya. The study found that 80% of respondents were most interested in an in-patient cover to cushion the cost of hospital admissions, saying getting such insurance for free is incentive enough to repay their loans on time. Almost 50% of the treatment group opted in to having insurance payments added to their future loans, citing the idea of low-cost insurance from a financial service provider they know and trust as a key incentive.

This data pack contains several files (in .csv and .dta formats) with information collected about households and household members participating in the 2012-2013 Kenya Financial Diaries study.

“…fintech innovations need to be more inclusive, easier to use, and designers should work harder to provide greater consumer protection and empowerment.”

I spent a week in Kenya, courtesy of Financial Sector Deepening, an initiative of a number of aid agencies, including Britain’s Department for International Development, the Swedish government, and the Gates Foundation. 

There has been a considerable amount of commentary in the press recently on the stability of the savings and credit cooperatives (SACCO) sector in Kenya based on a report released by the FSD network.

In order to understand the take‐up, use, and impacts of M‐PESA in Kenya, US based Principal Investigators William Jack (Georgetown) and Tavneet Suri (MIT Sloan School of Management) conducted a set of five surveys across Kenya, starting in yearly between 2008 and 2011, with a fifth survey conducted in 2014 to look at the longer-term impacts of M-PESA.

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.

During his delivery of the 3rd FSD Kenya annual lecture on financial inclusion, John Kay argued that the challenge for emerging economies is to avoid the mistakes of the west and to instead focus on building a financial sector that is focussed on the core needs of the non-financial economy.

Kenya’s annual financial inclusion lecture sets out how to protect consumers and drive growth in financial services

Policymakers, academics, industry players, donors and other stakeholders gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Thursday 8th December for the 2nd FSD Kenya annual lecture on financial inclusion.

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.

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.