A card up Africa's sleeve

A CARD UP AFRICA’S SLEEVE

If you've ever drunkenly cursed the cash machine for swallowing your card because you have forgotten your Pin, keeping you from a kebab or a minicab ride home, here's an invention that could prove useful. This cash card doesn’t need anything other than our hand: biometric technology means a few crisp notes are just a fingerprint away.

There's one catch, though: It's not available in Britain. The Opportunity International Bank of

Malawi provides financial services in the world's fifth poorest country and its fingerprint technology gives secure access for those who may be illiterate or lack formal identification such as a passport.

Armoured-car banking

The bank says: 'You can't access someone's account even if you cut off their hand, take the hand to an ATM and try to Use their fingerprint The hand has' to have blood pumping through it for the ID to work.' Well that's a relief.

Last June, Opportunity International also launched mobile banking in Mozambique.

An armoured vehicle linked to the Central Bank’s IT system via cellular technology makes weekly visits to remote areas so farmers and poor households can access micro loans as well as, deposit savings, however small 'The poor aren't "risks"; they’re actually good stewards of money because their lives depend on it so much,' says Tamsin Morrison, of Opportunity.

And, despite lacking pensions and Isas, many poor people in Africa do save. They tend to keep their money in hiding places as banks may be far away or their savings too small to be accepted because the bank comes to them, clients don't have to leave their work and make long risky treks to the cities.

Opportunity’s innovations reveal just how far technology could offer an invaluable shortcut or Development, something highlighted by Development Secretary Douglas AIexander in a Foreign Policy Centre speech earlier this month. We’ve seen leapfrogging of technology, from the absence of land-based phones to the ubiquity of mobile telephony in sub-Saharan Africa,' he said. Emerging economies, it seems, can jump straight into the 21^st century.

And, if current figures are anything to go by, 'leapfrogging' is happening more quickly than predicted. Within the next few months, China will take the place of the 'US as the country with .the world's largest number of internet users.

India introduced its own “people's car” in January, the Tata Nano, which retails at £I,250, and is now launching a mobile phone to sell for just a tenner. The Spice Telecom product is aimed at the 'next billion' owners of mobile phones in the developing world.

Quicker to catch on

Technology is spreading in emerging markets faster than it has ever done anywhere. The World Bank found that the gap between invention and widespread adoption is closing 'fast (see box): railways may have taken 120 years to catch on but mobile phones reached 80 per cent country coverage within just 16 years.

Since microfinance organization Grameen Bank (co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace prize) joined forces With Norway's Telenor to set up Grameenphone in 1996, Bangladesh has increased its phone penetration from one per 500 people to one per seven today.

Figures such as these have helped kick-start another form of mobile banking in developing countries: Vodafone and Safaricom in Kenya launched M-Pesa ('mobile money' in Swahili) last year, intending to streamline microfinance operations by allowing loans dispersal and repayment by ceil phones.

In the first three months, the service attracted 175,000 subscribers, and it was soon being used for person-to­ person transfers. Rather than needing a bank account, customers load money into their phones by paying cash at selected outlets" such as grocery stores and petrol stations. They then text money ('stored value') to other mobiles.

But while mobiles are suited to the challenge of quick-fix development, the World Bank has found that most technologies still take longer to spread, and reach fewer people, in developing countries. Reasons range from lack of old technologies to education or governance problems.

So old-fashioned development work is still needed. But technology can :bring economic benefits to poorer regions in a direct way. And, one day, it might help us get that taxi ride home. www.opportunity.org.uk