Recent Blogs
Geography Matters When Talking about Smallholders
As a smallholder, geography not only determines the climate of your village and the farm-readiness of your land, but also plays a role in determining how well-connected you are to irrigation, inputs like seeds and fertilizer, buyers, markets, and training.
Smallholder Households: A Financial Inclusion Imperative
A new Focus Note provides early insights into the Smallholder Households Financial Diaries project and highlights how smallholders weave together agricultural and nonagricultural sources of income to meet their needs.
"It's About Life," Not Just Agriculture
Agriculture is just one of many sources of income for smallholder farmer households. This post focuses on how one family that has dealt with multiple unexpected financial demands and diverse sources of income.
Tanzania: Africa’s Other Mobile Money Juggernaut
Tanzania has seen a rapid spread of mobile money and is hot on the heels of Kenya in terms of uptake and use of digital financial services.
How Tanzania Established Mobile Money Interoperability
Tanzania’s mobile money industry is flourishing. With a new set of standards governing person-to-person payments across multiple networks, it’s now evident that interoperability is here to stay.
USSD Access: A Gateway and Barrier to Effective Competition
To serve the unbanked, mobile financial service providers continue to rely on USSD technology to bring innovations like mobile money to the unbanked. CGAP research in Kenya and Tanzania identified several competition-relevant issues in USSD access.
Talking Avocados, Spinach & Catfish with a Tanzanian Rice Farmer
Although Gideon, a participant in CGAP's financial diaries of smallholder families research, is technically a rice farmer, much of his income is comprised of income from other crops and and non-agricultural activities.
CGAP’s National Surveys of Smallholder Households
CGAP is undertaking national surveys of smallholders in Mozambique and Tanzania to identify distinct segments of households and determine their demand for financial services.
Simple Messages Help Consumers Understand Big Data
After experimenting with SMS messages with Tanzanian microfinance loan applicants, First Access determined that customers can learn a lot about data and their privacy from simple forms of communication.
Providing Last Mile Customer Service for Solar Home Systems
Off Grid Electric (OGE) is a solar company in Tanzania that provides low-cost energy services to households without energy access. The company is focused on breaking new ground in last-mile service.
Is Tanzania Ready for Interoperability in Mobile Money?
Even though interoperability could potentially benefit the mobile financial services market, thus far there have been few attempts to get mobile money systems to work together. It may be too early for interoperability in some areas, Tanzania seems ready.
Preparing to Spend a Year with Smallholder Farmers in Tanzania
The preparations for the smallholder farmer household financial diaries continue in Tanzania, Pakistan and Mozambique. Here we discuss the site selection process in Tanzania, which we completed in advance of the sampling and recruiting of households.
Why Financial Diaries to Understand the Needs of Smallholders?
CGAP is working with Bankable Frontier Associates to conduct a financial diaries project on 90 families in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Pakistan.
Does Outpatient Care Through Microinsurance Offer Value?
Is there a business case for microinsurance? Does it provide value for clients? In Tanzania, The MicroInsurance Centre's MILK Project found two clear benefits to clients: getting them to a doctor sooner and efficiently financing health shocks.
Mobile Money Agents in Tanzania: How Busy, How Exclusive?
The Financial Sector Deepening Trust of Tanzania (FSDT) undertook a census of cash outlets in the country, and discovered that half of all agents do more than 30 transactions per month and nearly two-thirds of agents are exclusive to M-PESA.
Where’s The Cash? The Geography Of Cash Points In Tanzania
Places where one can exchange cash for transferable or storable electronic value is an essential component of financial access. Given the paucity of financial infrastructure in Tanzania, we wanted to know how deeply mobile money agents have penetrated rural areas.
The Art of Discovery: Incubating Mobile Money Ideas In Uganda
How can we creatively design products that can have a real impact on the mobile money market? This post shares the experience of Grameen App Lab in Uganda.
Rural vs Urban Mobile Money Use: Insights From Demand-Side Data
The second post in our series described the importance of demand-side data for understanding consumers and their financial habits and needs. Various organizations are contributing to the global pool of demand-side data in branchless banking and in this post we’ll focus on two of the main sources. The Financial Inclusion Tracking Surveys (FITS) are annual household panel surveys in Uganda, Tanzania, and Pakistan while the Tanzania Mobile Money Tracker Study (TMMT) uses quarterly surveys to track market trends. Both are being carried out by InterMedia and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In this post, we’ll highlight some of the analysis on rural and urban households to demonstrate the actionable insights that can be gathered from such datasets.
How to Save Lives and Lower Fuel Consumption: Clean Cookstoves
Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly 3 billion people in the developing world – causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and children the most affected.