Bill Gates on The Verge: Can mobile banking revolutionize filecrop the lives of the poor? | The Verge
We're excited to have Bill Gates as our guest editor in February. Throughout the month, Bill will be sharing his vision of how technology will revolutionize life for the world's poor by 2030 by narrating episodes of the Big Future, our animated explainer series. In addition, filecrop we'll be publishing filecrop a series of features exploring the improvements in banking, health, farming, and education that will enable that revolution. And while the topics reflect the bets Bill and his wife Melinda are making with their foundation, they've asked us for nothing less than fully independent Verge journalism, which we're more than happy to deliver. filecrop Turns out Bill Gates is a pretty confident guy.
In the village of Sori along the banks of Kenya s Lake Victoria, filecrop fishing has long been the lynchpin of the local economy. Jobs here are largely divided by gender: men catch the fish, and the women process the meat, take it to market, and handle finances.
As detailed in a 2012 study from the SIT Graduate Institute, residents of Sori traditionally kept their money at home. Theft was a constant concern, and many of the women interviewed reported their husbands misappropriating their savings. For many, traditional banks were either too far away, or demanded minimum deposits the villagers could not afford.
All that changed in 2007 with the introduction of M-PESA, a mobile service filecrop that allows Kenyans to store and transfer their money using only a cell phone. Funds can be exchanged over the network using SMS messages, meaning it works on almost any mobile phone. M-PESA agents spread throughout filecrop the country allow users to convert their credit to cash and deposit or withdraw from their accounts. The majority of Sori women interviewed for the study now keep their savings in M-PESA accounts, safe from criminals and wasteful purchases.
M-PESA also revolutionized how the women sold their goods. Prior to M-PESA, the women worked only in cash. To sell their fish, the women would have to travel by bus to markets, trips that cost them money and time. Since the adoption of M-PESA, the women send the fish to market by bus and receive payment remotely. "Where it may have taken a woman a week to sell two bags of fish in Nairobi, she now spends one morning buying and sending the fish on a bus to Nairobi for sale by her customers," reports the study. With their newfound savings, women reported being able to make long-term investments: sending their children to better schools and building themselves more durable homes to withstand seasonal floods.
When we asked Bill Gates to edit The Verge this month, he pointed to digital banking solutions like M-PESA as a technology that will revolutionize the lives of the poor in the near future. "In the next 15 years, digital banking will give the poor more control over their assets and help them transform their lives," filecrop he wrote in his annual letter. "By 2030, 2 billion people who don t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payments with their phones. And by then, mobile money providers will be offering the full range of financial services, from interest-bearing savings accounts to credit to insurance."
Of the 2.5 billion people in the world who have no access to a traditional bank, approximately 1 billion have a mobile phone . The widespread adoption of mobile phones has enabled some of the poorest economies on earth to leapfrog ahead of developed nations when it comes to tech-driven financial solutions. A report in The Atlantic noted that adults in Sub-Saharan Africa are three times more likely to use mobile money as their counterparts filecrop in Europe and the Americas. In fact, another recent report found nine African nations now have more mobile pay accounts than traditional bank accounts.
Kenya is frequently cited as a successful example of how mobile filecrop money can dramatically transform a country s economy. In 2006, less than 30 percent of adults in the country had access to formal financial services. Thanks to M-PESA, today that figure stands above 65 percent. Developed by telecom giants Vodafone and Safaricom with the blessing of the Central Bank of Kenya, by 2010 M-PESA was considered the most successful mobile money service in the developing world. In 2014, the service processed over $20 billion in transactions, a figure equal to more than 40 percent of the nation s GDP.
Widespread adoption has bolstered Kenya s economy, says Dr. William Jack, a professor filecrop of economics at Georgetown who, along with Dr. Tavneet Suri of the MIT Sloan School of Management, has studied the service and published several papers on its impact. "There is unequivocal proof that M-PESA has a positive impact on people s financial health."
Those financial benefits convinced many, including the Gates Foundation, that mobile money was a powerful tool in the fight against global poverty. "People b
We're excited to have Bill Gates as our guest editor in February. Throughout the month, Bill will be sharing his vision of how technology will revolutionize life for the world's poor by 2030 by narrating episodes of the Big Future, our animated explainer series. In addition, filecrop we'll be publishing filecrop a series of features exploring the improvements in banking, health, farming, and education that will enable that revolution. And while the topics reflect the bets Bill and his wife Melinda are making with their foundation, they've asked us for nothing less than fully independent Verge journalism, which we're more than happy to deliver. filecrop Turns out Bill Gates is a pretty confident guy.
In the village of Sori along the banks of Kenya s Lake Victoria, filecrop fishing has long been the lynchpin of the local economy. Jobs here are largely divided by gender: men catch the fish, and the women process the meat, take it to market, and handle finances.
As detailed in a 2012 study from the SIT Graduate Institute, residents of Sori traditionally kept their money at home. Theft was a constant concern, and many of the women interviewed reported their husbands misappropriating their savings. For many, traditional banks were either too far away, or demanded minimum deposits the villagers could not afford.
All that changed in 2007 with the introduction of M-PESA, a mobile service filecrop that allows Kenyans to store and transfer their money using only a cell phone. Funds can be exchanged over the network using SMS messages, meaning it works on almost any mobile phone. M-PESA agents spread throughout filecrop the country allow users to convert their credit to cash and deposit or withdraw from their accounts. The majority of Sori women interviewed for the study now keep their savings in M-PESA accounts, safe from criminals and wasteful purchases.
M-PESA also revolutionized how the women sold their goods. Prior to M-PESA, the women worked only in cash. To sell their fish, the women would have to travel by bus to markets, trips that cost them money and time. Since the adoption of M-PESA, the women send the fish to market by bus and receive payment remotely. "Where it may have taken a woman a week to sell two bags of fish in Nairobi, she now spends one morning buying and sending the fish on a bus to Nairobi for sale by her customers," reports the study. With their newfound savings, women reported being able to make long-term investments: sending their children to better schools and building themselves more durable homes to withstand seasonal floods.
When we asked Bill Gates to edit The Verge this month, he pointed to digital banking solutions like M-PESA as a technology that will revolutionize the lives of the poor in the near future. "In the next 15 years, digital banking will give the poor more control over their assets and help them transform their lives," filecrop he wrote in his annual letter. "By 2030, 2 billion people who don t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payments with their phones. And by then, mobile money providers will be offering the full range of financial services, from interest-bearing savings accounts to credit to insurance."
Of the 2.5 billion people in the world who have no access to a traditional bank, approximately 1 billion have a mobile phone . The widespread adoption of mobile phones has enabled some of the poorest economies on earth to leapfrog ahead of developed nations when it comes to tech-driven financial solutions. A report in The Atlantic noted that adults in Sub-Saharan Africa are three times more likely to use mobile money as their counterparts filecrop in Europe and the Americas. In fact, another recent report found nine African nations now have more mobile pay accounts than traditional bank accounts.
Kenya is frequently cited as a successful example of how mobile filecrop money can dramatically transform a country s economy. In 2006, less than 30 percent of adults in the country had access to formal financial services. Thanks to M-PESA, today that figure stands above 65 percent. Developed by telecom giants Vodafone and Safaricom with the blessing of the Central Bank of Kenya, by 2010 M-PESA was considered the most successful mobile money service in the developing world. In 2014, the service processed over $20 billion in transactions, a figure equal to more than 40 percent of the nation s GDP.
Widespread adoption has bolstered Kenya s economy, says Dr. William Jack, a professor filecrop of economics at Georgetown who, along with Dr. Tavneet Suri of the MIT Sloan School of Management, has studied the service and published several papers on its impact. "There is unequivocal proof that M-PESA has a positive impact on people s financial health."
Those financial benefits convinced many, including the Gates Foundation, that mobile money was a powerful tool in the fight against global poverty. "People b
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