Africa

Promoting good practices in women entrepreneur financing has always been an important focus of the SME Finance Forum. Financial inclusion for women has always been challenging, particularly in emerging and developing markets where women entrepreneurs have lower access to capital, which severely restricts their progress and ability to contribute to the national economies. The COVID-19 crisis makes financial inclusion for female entrepreneurs even more challenging as it poses serious threats to the financial stability of SMEs, and especially to women entrepreneurs.

Washington, D.C., March 12th, 2020 –FCMB Group, First City Monument Bank Limited, became the newest member of the SME Finance Forum, a global membership network that brings together financial institutions, technology companies, and development finance institutions to share knowledge, spur innovation, and promote the growth of SMEs. 

Washington, D.C., December 12th, 2019 – ACREMAC became the newest member of the SME Finance Forum, a global membership network that brings together financial institutions, technology companies, and development finance institutions to share knowledge, spur innovation, and promote the growth of SMEs. 

Proparco’s 10-year anniversary issue of the Private Sector & Development magazine focuses on SME finance in Africa. As with each issue, Member Proparco gives a voice to a wide range of contributors: entrepreneurs, economists or fintech experts, allowing us to take a fresh look at the subject of SME financing, have a feeling from the ground of the difficulties still encountered by SMEs in Africa, and see the possible practical solutions.

BFA is about to conclude our FIBR (Financial Inclusion on Business Runways) Project, an innovative R&D initiative which sought to demonstrate how smartphones can accelerate and deepen financial inclusion in developing countries. When we launched the FIBR Project in 2015, we outlined a set of assumptions about how increased connectivity and digitization would create “business runways for financial inclusion” for small businesses in Africa, helping to accelerate the ongoing process toward greater inclusion.

This paper shows that taxation on mobile phone airtime and financial transactions may not expand the tax base significantly but, rather, may reverse the gains on retail electronic payments and financial inclusion. A higher tax rate on low-level retail electronic transactions mostly levied on low-income earners that are sensitive to transaction costs may discourage the use of mobile phone-based transactions, incentivizing them to revert to cash transactions to evade taxes and so less tax revenue. This trend will deal a big blow to the financial inclusion success witnessed so far.

A lack of data on the youth segment has led many to assume that young people don’t make good clients. However, a growing body of evidence shows that youth have significant potential as clients.
Read more in this CGAP’s blog.

This year, the Group of Seven (G7) outlined an agenda to fight inequality. As part of this agenda, the G7 Partnership for Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa will support African governments, central banks, and financial institutions in their efforts to build more inclusive, sustainable, and responsible digital financial systems, ensuring that 400 million more African adults are financially included—nearly 60 percent of whom are women. Essential to efforts to expand digital financial inclusion to women