Bitcoin Projects Are Bringing Financial Inclusion To Feature Phones In Africa
Accelerating Bitcoin adoption, and therefore financial inclusion, in Africa means offering Lightning access through lower-tech phones.This is an opinion editorial by Heritage Falodun, a Bitcoin analyst and computer scientist based in Nigeria.Expanding Bitcoin adoption across the African continent won’t only come through bitcoin its declaration as legal tender, but through easy and low-cost access as well. People’s opinions are colored with different perspectives, but mine is all about painting the big picture of what Africans are in need of: Africans want and will adopt any solution that....
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The ease and convenience of services backed with the emerging techs can dramatically improve the financial landscape in Africa. Africa is the home to 1.2 billion people and what has been described as the world’s largest trade area — the African Continental Free Trade Area. Africa is forging a new path to driving development, and access to financial services will play a significant role in its economic growth. The need to provide improved systems for poverty reduction, if not alleviation, is further accentuated when one considers that 416 million Africans live in extreme poverty, and access....
To many, Africa may seem as a continent wth little or no technological development whatsoever, and that is the first time mistake people make. Most Africans do not own credit cards or bank accounts, but they are owners of cell phones, and it’s through these cell phones where African people make their transactions. But how is cell phone use influenced by cryptocurrency? Companies such as M-Pesa which handle a majority of transactions in Africa are the clear definition of how methods of digital transactions can rule a country’s economic system. Although M-Pesa works by using the Swahili as....
International remittance is ostensibly one of the most compelling use cases for bitcoin and digital currencies. Recorded remittances to Africa grew four-fold between 1990 and 2010 and have increased steadily since. The World Bank projects $39bn in remittances to sub-Saharan Africa this year. Yet with the continent's fast-growing middle class and tech-savvy youth population, the high cost of remitting to sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from within Africa, has brought the subject of financial inclusion under new light. Africa has some serious market potential for bitcoin companies;....
In a guest post on Virgin Entrepreneur Dominic Frisby - the author of "Bitcoin: the Future of Money?" - argues that Bitcoin will do to banking what the cell phone did to telecom. Cell phones are technically more advanced and much more flexible than landline phones, and today they offer a lot of new and useful options, but the main reason for the explosive growth of the cell phone market worldwide is financial inclusion. "Quite simply, many people couldn't get access to the basic financial services needed to get a landline. Landlines were, except for pay-phones, credit-based. You needed a....
Coins, a bitcoin startup that aims to bring financial inclusion in Southeast Asia has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding to accelerate its effort to bring basic financial services for the unbanked in the region. Led by the Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund, the funding round also involved notable investors that includes prolific bitcoin- and blockchain-centric Digtial Currency Group former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Other investors include the investment arms of Globe Telecom and Smart Communications, the biggest telecom companies in the Philippines, making....