Making Finance Work for Africa (MFW4A) has announced its participation in the sixth annual AITEC Banking & Mobile Money West Africa conference holding March 13 and 14 in Lagos.
In line with this year’s conference theme “Consolidating and Monetizing the Gains of Innovation”, MFW4A is organizing a consultative workshop on March 14, aimed at providing a common platform for its Mobile Banking Donor Working Group (MB-DWG) members, to showcase their organizations’ interventions on Mobile Technology in order to increase access to finance in Africa.
The consultative workshop will set the stage for deepening engagement between MFW4A MB-DWG members, telecom operators, service providers, NGOs, the civil society, financial policy makers, ICT practitioners and private sector bankers as they explore innovative mobile banking approaches in Africa. In addition, MFW4A will have an exhibition stand during the two-day conference, with the aim of promoting MB-DWG members’ activities and knowledge products, and networking with the over 300 participants expected to attend from the financial services sector.
MFW4A and the MB-DWG members have been strongly involved in enhancing the development of mobile financial services in Africa. Guided by one of the recommendations arising from the MFW4A Book “Financing Africa: Through the Crisis and Beyond”, which encouraged the development of mobile technology as an important transformational model, MFW4A launched the MB-DWG initiative in July 2011 in collaboration with CGAP to promote closer collaboration and strengthen joint co-ordination with its members.
Welcoming the opportunity to participate in the AITEC conference in Lagos, Stefan Nalletamby, MFW4A Partnership Coordinator, said: “In the recent past, the landscape of African financial sectors has changed significantly. Mobile banking innovation is especially important in Africa where it is enabling to leapfrog a number of infrastructure constraints. In Nigeria alone, there are over 90 million mobile subscribers, and mobile banking solutions have the potential to significantly impact financial inclusion in that country.”