M-PESA Marches On
M-PESA Marches On Financial Access Initiative Blog This is a guest post by Jake Kendall of the Gates Foundation New data shows M-PESA is now reaching most of the poor, unbanked, and rural populations in Kenya – and measurably improving their lives. M-PESA is a mobile-phone based electronic payment and store of value system which in just over three years has managed to acquire 57% of the Kenyan adult population as customers, and who between them do more money transfers domestically than Western Union does globally. Though money transfer services and savings accounts are nothing new, M-PESA's real innovation is that customers can deposit and withdraw cash at any of 20,000 stores – that's 20 times the number of bank branches in the country! Many in the field of financial inclusion believe M-PESA has potential as a development tool because it significantly lowers transactions costs for intra-family remittances, commerce, utility bill payments and...