March 9, 2010 - Grameen Foundation has won a top prize for mobile banking at the Marketplace on Innovative Financial Solutions for Development. Co-hosted by Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, the conference focused on spotlighting “fresh ideas” for using innovative financing tools to solve development challenges.
Our submission for mobile banking was selected among the top 20 finalists from a pool of 800 projects covering more than 15 developing countries across five continents. Elizabeth Berthe, Grameen Foundation’s director of Village Solutions, then travelled to Paris to present it before a jury which included Axel van Trotsenburg, vice president for Concessional Finance and Global Partnerships, World Bank; Geoffrey Lamb, managing director for Public Policy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Jayaseelan Naidoo, chairman, Development Bank of Southern Africa; Daniel Lebègue, president, Eparne san Frontière (Savings without Borders) and John Buley, managing director, Principal Investments, JP Morgan.
The winning projects, which all received a $100,000 grant, were judged on how easily they could be replicated and increase capacity to meet demand, as well as their overall impact.
Grameen Foundation will work with KEEF, a Kenyan microfinance institution (MFI), to implement a holistic new approach for integrating their technology systems and processes that can be replicated by other MFIs. This approach has three components: a back-end microfinance portfolio management system; an integrated front-end mobile money solution; and business process optimization to fully leverage this end-to-end technology solution.
Daniel Kimani of KEEF and Elizabeth Berthe discuss their project with Dailymotion.