PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

The Infinite Potential of Mobile Banking

Brookings has released a report on the state of access to finance in developing countries, taking a specific look at the lessons learned from the mobile banking sector in Kenya. The report paints a troubling picture of the state of financial access in many developing countries, but then gives some reasons for optimism.

First, the bad news:

Access to financial services, and indeed overall financial development, is crucial to economic growth and poverty reduction. Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 1 in 5 households have access to financial services. In 2007, over 70 percent of Kenyan households did not have bank accounts or relied on informal sources of finance. In 2006, there were only 35 bank branches in Benin, a country with a population of 7 million. This lack of formal financial services limits market exchanges, increases risk and limits opportunities to save. Without formal financial services, households rely on informal services that are associated with high transaction costs.

World Bank gets its own data visualizer

Perhaps taking a page from Hans Rosling's extremely popular presentation of development data at the 2006 TED Talks, the World Bank now has its own publicly accessible tool for data visualisation. This first version of the tool contains 49 indicators for 209 countries taken from the World Development Indicators.

Just to get a taste of how the tool works, I looked at the number of internet users per 100 people (Y-axis) compared to GNI per capita (X-axis) and got the chart below. Each of the colored blobs represents a country, and the size of the blob represents total population. On casual observation, it looks like a lot of countries that are more wired than their income levels would predict are in eastern Europe.

For those who really want to get crazy, the tool also allows you to "play" the statistics over time. If you want to learn more about how not to bore your audience to death during your next Powerpoint presentation, check out this video tutorial. (Highly recommended for all development professionals.)

Mobile Banking: The banks are asleep at the wheel

Last week saw an all-day event at the World Bank on Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation. The sessions covered the use of mobile phones in everything from governance to education. I attended a morning session on mobile innovations in financial services in which speakers covered issues on payments for ex-combatants in the DRC, Government-to-Person (G2P) payments, and pre-paid value card solutions.

However, the most interesting remark in this session came not from one of the speakers but the invited commentary. Why is it that we see network-centric players dominating this field in some cases (e.g. M-Pesa) or independent firms (e.g., Celpay, the provider of payment solutions for ex-combatants in DRC)? Andi Dervishi, the Global Practice Lead for Investments in Payments at IFC, put it very simply: "The banks are asleep at the wheel."

Experimenting with labor reforms in India

In a previous post I discussed how the current global financial crisis seems to have forced policy makers in India to take another look at existing labor laws in the country. The Economic Survey (2008-09) of India released by the Ministry of Finance in early July this year clearly noted the imperative need to facilitate the growth of labor intensive industries, "especially by reviewing labor laws and labor market regulations."

Labor market reform is a contentious and politically sensitive issue in India and its mere mention in the Economic Survey suggests that we might see some action this time around. A few weeks ago, the government exempted the IT and software establishments from the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946 (Central Act 20 of 1946). These laws are strict in the way they classify workers, their working hours and shifts, and the wages payable, besides other archaic rules on leave and attendance.

What is driving businesses to adopt the use of the internet?

Few would contest that the internet revolution has saved us a lot of time keeping in touch with others and conducting searches. For firms, time saved is labor saved and this is particularly attractive in countries that have stricter labor laws. What I’m suggesting here is that stricter labor laws may encourage firms to adopt modern labor-saving technologies such as the internet and computers. In theory this could magnify the adverse effect of stricter labor laws on employment and wages documented in the literature. So what does the data tell us?

Mobile phones for development: don’t forget about the voice!

Mobile phones heated up once again the development 2.0 summer debate: from the NYT on the uses of mobile phones for safe water distribution, to the upcoming World Bank study on mobile phones for education; from CTA’s overview of the uses of mobile phones for agricultural development to Chris’ foray into sensors and micro-voluntarism. And if you are interested in mobile banking for the unbanked, don’t miss Jim’s summer round-up.

In the midst of all this flurry—mostly focused on advanced features—my personal favourite, however, has to be an article from SocialBrite that brings us back to basics: namely, voice-based services. As the author notes:

A little reality check on business and the internet in developing countries

Internet usage has been increasing at a rapid rate over the last decade or so. For example, according to World Development Indicators (WDI, World Bank), internet subscribers equaled 13% of the total population in low and middle income countries in 2007. This is up from a mere 1.5% in 2000, implying on average an increase of over 109% per annum in the proportion of internet subscribers.

There is a small but growing body of work that shows that the spread of internet can have a fairly strong positive effect on economic efficiency, functioning of markets and economic development in general (see, for example, Freund and Weinhold 2002, 2004).

A good number of these studies use a general purpose measure of internet penetration such as the number of internet subscribers, portals, websites, hosts, etc. For these measures to make sense, it is important they correlate well with internet usage for business or commercial purposes. Simply exchanging, for example, personal emails with friends is unlikely to have any significant impact on economic growth.

iPhones for all!

The Economist has an interesting prediction for east Africa: "In a couple of years even fairly poor east Africans may be getting knowledge, news and entertainment on robust versions of existing Apple iPhone and Palm Pre models." This prediction comes just after Kenya's president connected the first of three planned fiber-optic submarine cables. For a bit of background on what all this means and what it took to get to this point, see this post on All things Africa and ICT. 

What can Chindia do to cope with the crisis?

One of the oft-cited causes of the financial crisis are the huge macroeconomic imbalances that developed between the United States and a number of emerging markets, particularly China. Neil Gregory, a senior adviser at the World Bank and author of New Industries from New Places, offers China and India some advice on coping with the crisis that should also help deal with these imbalances. From an interview with Neil on China and India's IT markets in India's Financial Express:

ICT reality check

Great advances in mobile telephony and internet access seem to promise a revolution in development. But Chris Kreutz on the crisscrossed blog reminds us just how big the constraints are. Among other things, Chris reports on a presentation at the Web4dev conference, and even in South Africa the obstacles are large:

• There is virtually no access to computers
• There is limited access to knowledge and information
• A child’s potential to learn is directly proportional to the knowledge of the teacher
• Many people have never even typed their names on a keyboard
• Where the edge of your world is as far as you can walk in a day

Check out the original post for the full reality check.