May 1, 2012
April 25, 2012
June 16, 2010
M-PESA: The Economist looks at the nuts and bolts
This week, The Economist turns its attention to the secret of M-PESA's mobile money success. As David Roodman, FAI's Jonathan Morduch and others recently observed on a Gates-Foundation sponsored visit to Kenya, when it comes to mobile banking, an awful lot of on-the-ground physical activity goes into enabling the technology side of mobile banking. For all its promise as a "cashless" solution, The Economist highlights the fact that there's still an awful lot of money that has to be moved around to keep the system going.
*See our “before and after” series on a recent Gates Foundation-sponsored visit to Kenya to observe the development of mobile banking at M-PESA.
Themes:
Technology Adoption
funders doing research?
Its interesting that the primary research underlying the Economist article was done by two employees of the Gates Foundation (Jake Kendall and Ignacio Mas). Presumably they were the ones who sponsored the trip to Kenya? Its quite rare in our field to see funders diving into the research arena! I wonder if this signals a shift on the part of Gates to reduce funding for academic researchers and to start to bring things in-house?