Africa

The Mastercard Foundation in partnership with BFA released Digital Commerce and Youth Employment in Africa, new research that shows 80 million young people will benefit from the rise of digital commerce in Africa by 2030. These findings indicate that the digital commerce sector has the potential of disrupting the future of work on the continent.

The London Stock Exchange released a report detailing the issues faced by SMEs and opportunities with financing in Africa. 

SMEs account for about 90 percent of Africa’s businesses and the driving force of the continent’s economic development, yet they are still facing financial barriers. 

Key challenges SMEs are facing include:

Yoco has decreased a process that originally took SMEs weeks to complete down to 10 minutes.

Co-founder and CEO of Yoco, Katlego Maphai, sits down with CNBC Africa to share how they are making card payments easy and accessible, in addition to securing R230mn to innovate SME payment services. 

Maphai shares, it is as simple as going online, paying for the card reader and it is shipped to your door. Majority of the sales interactions are conducted through social media, making the entire process less expensive.

For years, traditional banks shied away from serving many Africans because of the costs of physical branch expansion and the risks associated with serving low-income people. Small entrepreneurs found it particularly hard to access credit as they often lack the required collateral or credit history. But the launch and growth of digital financial services across the continent is changing that situation. This IFC Impact article profiles how mobile money offers Africans a financial future.

Digital Access: The Future of Financial Inclusion captures the knowledge and experienced that The Partnership for Financial Inclusion has gained over the past six years, working to develop and promote commercially sustainable solutions for greater financial inclusion across Sub-Saharan Africa. It includes case studies, research highlights, market overviews, interviews with industry practitioners, impact stories, as well as their insights and ideas for the future.

This Focus Note by Marissa Dean and the supported by the Mastercard Foundation summarizes how 30 leading organizations across Kenya and Tanzania are thinking about or actively using big data and analytics as they explore this space in digital finance. The findings are based on interviews with these organizations—which include banks, microfinance institutions (MFIs), mobile network operators (MNOs), and FinTech organizations (listed in Appendix: Research Approach)—conducted between August and September 2017.

More than 40 percent of African entrepreneurs cite access to finance as the major factor limiting their growth, according to World Bank Enterprise Surveys. In this article, the author says that West African start-ups and innovative young SMEs are indeed facing the classic ‘valley of death’ — the space between where the entrepreneur’s own resources from family and friends (“love money”) gets depleted and when the company is financially viable enough to attract later-stage investment and financing available on the market.