How Nations Transform Through Strategic Learning

Photo courtesy of MEI In 2007, a Vodafone Executive named Nick Hughes conceived a Corporate Social Responsibility project aimed at providing banking services to millions of people in Kenya who had never seen the inside of a bank. Kenya’s financial infrastructure was limited with most rural areas lacking bank branches, ATMs or even reliable electricity. Traditional banking required expensive brick and mortar infrastructure that would take decades to build and might never reach remote villages. Hughes’s solution was elegantly simple: turn every mobile phone into a bank. M-Pesa, launched that year, allowed users to deposit, transfer and withdraw money using…

Read the full article →