Last week we passed a major milestone – going live with our first MFI partner outside of East Africa. Musoni now provides its services to MFIs in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe!
One reason we’re so excited to have expanded into Zimbabwe is the success of mobile money in the country. While the MMT spotlight has traditionally focussed on M-PESA in Kenya, since launching in 2011 Ecocash in Zimbabwe has steadily and successfully grown both its subscriber base and its volume of funds processed each month.
A few days ago, Ecocash announced that it had registered 3.5m mobile money accounts (roughly 27% of the Zimbabwean population), and that the total volume of funds transferred across their platform since launch exceeded $4 billion. All this in just three years!
The success of Ecocash makes Zimbabwe an extremely exciting market for Musoni. Together with our local partners, over the next year we aim to bring the benefits of mobile microfinance to the many MFIs in the region, helping them all to improve their operations and reduce their costs.
Watch this space!