Buddy Buruku

Financial Sector Specialist

Through January 2021, Buddy Buruku was CGAP’s in-country lead in Ghana and a digital financial services (DFS) adviser. With CGAP, Buddy worked on the use of DFS to drive Ghana’s cash-lite agenda and on DFS market development as a tool for financial inclusion. She specializes in the digitization of payments in agriculture and in the generation of national data on the status of financial inclusion. Insights from this work are being used by the central bank, the Ministry of Finance, and industry to promote DFS.

Before joining CGAP, Buddy worked at the African Center for Economic Transformation advising high-level government officials on how to improve the efficiency of their economies. She has consulted on financial services in New York, with a focus on big data analytics. She has also advised on renewable energy and energy efficiency in Beijing. She is the founder of a commercial poultry farm in Uganda.

Buddy has a Master’s degree in Business Management from the Wharton School, a Master's from the Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center, and a Bachelor’s in East Asian studies from Haverford College. She speaks six languages, including Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

By Buddy Buruku

Blog

How Ghana’s New Digital Finance Policy Can Drive Women’s Inclusion

Ghana launched the world's first digital finance policy earlier this year. Here are five ways the new policy can be implemented to help Ghana close its gender gap in financial inclusion.
Blog

Ghana Launches World’s First Digital Finance Policy Amid COVID-19

While the new policy has been years in the making, the government hopes the policy will support its measures to leverage digital financial services in its COVID-19 response.
Blog

How Ghana Set Its Rules on Interest Payment on e-Money Accounts

Soon, customers in Ghana will earn interest on their mobile money wallets. How did Ghana do it differently than Tanzania, the first country where a mobile money service paid out interest?
Blog

Digitizing Agricultural Value Chains: How Buyers Drive Uptake

Most companies don’t want to be the first in a sector to try something new and potentially unpopular. Dominant buyers must lead the way to drive large-scale mobile money uptake by smallholder farmers.
Blog

Digitizing Agriculture Value Chains: The Story So far

For the 7% of the world's smallholder farmers who work in tight value chains, digitizing the steps required to move an agricultural product from the farm to final customers could be an opportunity to deepen financial inclusion.