Introduction: Leapfrogging Sub Saharan Style
Leapfrog – is commonly associated with East Africa. Sub Saharan Africa’s potential to overcome persistent challenges in novel ways abound in heaps –attributable to a convergence of forces i.e. a rapid technological boon and a resurgence of SSA development activity. As an example, the wild success of a simple communication tool, the mobile phone transformed traditional banking models and prompted thoughts on next generation financial services. SSA is poised to ride on technology rails and in a truly unique fashion leveraging technology to break down traditional barriers to financial access.
Bright B. Simons, on a past post for the Harvard Business Review
“In much the same way that Africa’s lack of significant telecom capacity was a boon rather than a hindrance to the emergence of mobile telephony, its lack of legacy infrastructure for everything ranging from waste management to energy utilities could provide the appetite — non-existent in the West — for genuinely transformative, future-friendly reconceptualization of the very notion of infrastructure”
Breaking Banks: Mobile Money Operators redefine financial services
Take financial services in East Africa which are increasingly offered through a simple communication tool, the mobile phone. The far reaching implications of fusing technology and financial synergies to address developmental challenges are of a grand scale. For the unbanked, access to financial services, credit, savings accounts, investment schemes and innovative financial products are now feasible en masse through last mile cellular network channels. [Read more…]
