TANZANIA is among the three East African states that lead the Sub-Saharan Africa in mobile banking, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Breton Wood institution said out of
28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for which information is available,
the three countries have holders of mobile accounts exceeding 30 per
cent of the adult population.
The fund named three leading countries
with their percentage in brackets as Kenya (60), Uganda (37) and
Tanzania (35). The report, Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan
Africa, issued yesterday, placed Rwanda on seventh position with
slightly less than 20 per cent. Burundi was at the tail with about two
per cent while South Sudan featured nowhere in the report probably due
to lack of available data.
“Kenya leads the region,” the report
shows, “But mobile money transactions are also growing rapidly in
Tanzania and Uganda, where the transactions doubled in the last three
years in terms of broad money, reaching about 30 percent in mid-2015”.
In several African countries, namely
Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Niger, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, the number
of mobile accounts has already exceeded the number of traditional bank
accounts. “The developments in mobile money boost financial inclusion,
complementing traditional bank services,” IMF says in the report.
It adds: “The number of banking
transactions via mobile devices almost doubled in the region in the last
two years. East Africa has led this trend, but mobile banking has also
increased in other parts of Africa”.
Early this year, the central bank set
new targets of financial inclusion after the previous one was surpassed
ahead of deadline as 80 per cent of adult population using a financial
access point. The BoT moved the target to 70 per cent by 2017 from 50
per cent set for 2014
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