The World Bank Group considers financial inclusion as a key enabler in reducing extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. It has put forward an ambitious goal to reach Universal Financial Access (UFA) by 2020. According to the Global Findex Database which is released by the World Bank every three years, as of April 2018, close to one-third of all adults globally (i.e., 1.7 billion) remained unbanked. Half of these include women, members of poor households in rural areas, or those who are not a part of the workforce.
Against this background, the statistics from Africa are truly astounding – a whopping 370 million people still remain unbanked and unserved out of the total population of 590 million. Digital financial services play a major role in the increase of financial inclusion in Africa. The number of new FinTech users has increased by 250% to 7.2 million in 2017[1] from the 2012 baseline. This led to the growth of financial inclusion in Africa from 23% in 2011 to 43% in 2017.
Top African Countries – Financial Inclusion
Kenya
-
Kenya has the highest number of startups that are working towards financial inclusion. The country is a leader in developing mobile money payment systems and in widespread usage of financial services.
-
The startups have made a significant impact on the financial inclusion of the country as the total percentage of financially included adults (age 15+) increased by 39.3%, i.e., from 42.3% in 2011 to 81.6% in 2017.
-
With regard to financially included adults, 72.9% had mobile money accounts whereas 55.7% had
