Digital Financial Services (DFS) and
Market infrastructure
The COVID-19 pandemic is still sweeping the globe and the number of recorded cases in Africa continues to grow. Not only is this pandemic having an impact on people’s health but the negative social and economic consequences are likely to be more acutely felt in Africa.
Policy responses are being formulated to address economic hardships, such as applying zero fees for mobile money transactions, cutting interest rates or freezing bond payments. However, most policymakers currently lack the real-time data to track the impact of different measures, in order to analyse, respond and adjust as necessary in this ever changing situation. Insight2impact(I2i)/ Centre for Financial Regulation and Inclusion (CENFRI), in partnership with the National Bank of Rwanda (BNR), the Rwandan Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA) and Access to Finance Rwanda (AFR), intend to address this data gap for Rwanda through the analysis of financial transaction data.
I2i developed a data dashboard that will provide up-to-date results for use by policymakers in reviewing the COVID-19 measures, especially concerning the differential impact on the population by geographic location, gender, age and level of digitisation.
Given the significant changes in mobile money behaviours already identified from the transaction data, a qualitative component was added to this project. This included qualitative interviews with merchants, customers, and agents in order to understand people’s choices, their motivations and what might make these behaviour changes stick, in the long-term as the pandemic evolves.
This project has three main objectives;
Project name | Establishment of a Data Dashboard that Tracks the Effects of The Covid-19 Pandemic on the Performance of Digital Financial Services in Rwanda |
Implementing partners | National Bank of Rwanda and RURA. CENFRI and 71.4 |
Project period | July 2020 – March 2021 |
Project objectives |
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Project total budget | US$ 187,003 |
Budget disbursed | US$ 169,676 |