Who’s Ready to Adopt Digital Financial Services?

Fraym's analysis of digital financial inclusion in Africa for the IFC.

African consumers are the global leaders in the adoption of digital financial services like mobile money. Yet traditional banks and emerging digital providers both continue to grapple with how to expand financial inclusion.  It can be expensive and difficult for financial services providers to figure out the most useful product offering and understand the market. Most providers find themselves with two options: expensive primary data collection or blindly introduce a product to the market and see what happens.

At Fraym, we’ve been thinking about how to approach this in a more strategic and efficient way. By harnessing our comprehensive demographic, expenditure, and geospatial data, we can determine who’s ready for a digital financial services product – the optimal customer – and where providers should target.

Read more here.

Electrifying sub-Saharan Africa

New analysis by the Fraym team:

600 Million Unconnected in Africa – Who Can Pay for Off-Grid Power?

What’s so special about Kenya’s Generation BUMP?

The young African consumer class is a highly prized demographic. Yet finding them can be tricky. Fraym recently used geospatial data to identify and locate Nigerians who are 18-34 years old, educated, and have money to spend. We found 29 million of them and dubbed this valuable demographic slice, Generation BUMP.

What about Kenya?  The Kenyan economy is growing rapidly, while its capital Nairobi is a stand-out performer on the Fraym Urban Markets Index, ranking 10th on the continent for metropolitan economic activity, consumer power, and trade and travel connections. Using neighborhood-level data across the country, Fraym identified Kenya’s Generation BUMP.

Kenya’s Generation BUMP is estimated at roughly 4.5 million strong, with just over 1 million living in Nairobi. But more than just sizable, this group is:

Banked. More than twice as likely to have a bank account (83 vs. 39 percent)
Urban. Three times as likely to live in an urban setting (65 vs. 22 percent)
Mobile. Phone ownership is nearly universal among Kenyan BUMPers at 98 percent (vs. 83 percent for non-BUMPers).
Plugged-in. Media consumption is starkly higher. They are more than twice as likely to regularly watch television (76 vs. 34 percent) or read newspapers (45 vs 18 percent).

Watch this space for more geospatial demographic and consumer analysis in other markets.

Impact of Boko Haram on Urbanization

Much attention has been placed on the rapid population growth in metropolitan Lagos. As one of Africa’s megacities and the growth engine for much of western Africa, that focus makes sense. However, the rate of urbanization actually has been much faster in historically less urban states, particularly due to the Boko Haram conflict.

As countries in the Lake Chad Basin continue to defend and rebuild areas affected by the Boko Haram insurgency, food insecurity is swelling across Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. The terrorist organization has caused over 20,000 deaths and displaced 2 million people since 2009 due to both violence and the inability of communities to maintain their farming-based livelihoods.

Where are these dislocated populations going?

See the Story map at Fraym.io

The Great Scooter Convergence in Nigeria

Nigeria has been in the press lately as a poster child for inequality as the income gap between the wealthy and the poor is, by some measures, widening. The World Bank estimates that 86 million Nigerians, almost half the population, live in extreme poverty.

Another way to think about inequality is to look at differences in asset ownership: do the poor possess assets that are associated with middle and upper-class standards of living?

We compared a decade’s worth of asset ownership data from household surveys and discovered an unexpected finding: ownership of scooters and motorcycles across different socioeconomic classes have converged.

Read more here.

Corridors Are the Key

Today at Youth Connekt Africa ECA's Executive Secretary Vera Songwe noted the need to focus on cities and corridors for greater impact in job creation with data and analysis from Fraym.

How are people’s lives changed by a new highway?

Fraym’s high-resolution time series mapping in Accra, Ghana for the AfDB.

Read more about this analysis and the AfDB’s results in the 2017 Annual Development Effectiveness Review.