Mobile financial services are critical drivers of financial inclusion and their successful deployment and adoption can have a positive impact on gross domestic product (GDP) in developing countries.

Countries with successful mobile money services had a yearly GDP per capita growth rate up to one percentage point higher than countries where mobile money platforms had not been successful or not introduced, new research from Vodafone Group, Vodacom Group, Safaricom and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) indicates.

This can reduce poverty by about 2.6%, based on previous World Bank research on the relationship between economic growth and reductions in the number of people living in poverty.

The ‘Digital Finance Platforms to Empower All’ report, the fourth research paper developed and released under Vodafone’s Africa.connected umbrella, shows that mobile financial services can also help businesses to reduce costs, access credit to invest and connect with consumers that were previously excluded from financial services.

“Mobile financial services platforms like M-Pesa are vital drivers of financial inclusion in society which can improve individual life chances and enable enterprises to launch and expand, bringing wealth and jobs into developing economies,” says Safaricom chief financial services officer and M-Pesa Africa CEO Sitoyo Lopokoiyit.

As mobile access grows, the transformative potential of mobile financial services increases too, ushering in greater financial inclusion and sustainable development.

The report highlights that, at the end of 2021, the number of mobile-device users across the world totalled 5.3-billion.

However, barriers remain to accessing platforms, including digital literacy and smartphone accessibility, as well as developing them, with an uneven regulatory playing field for nontraditional financial services providers in many countries.

The Africa.connected campaign, in partnership with the UNDP, aims to progress the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda by driving awareness around mobile services as a vehicle to tackle financial exclusion.

“Looking forward, governments, operators, and regulators alike should examine how they can accelerate the uptake and use of such solutions to simultaneously meet digitalisation and development targets,” the report comments.

The econometric modelling research examined 49 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

As part of the Africa.connected research, consumer surveys were conducted, focusing on users of M-Pesa in Kenya and Tanzania, and the results were extrapolated to Ghana and Mozambique.

A business survey was also conducted in Kenya, with the research underpinning the continuing importance of the world’s first mobile money service 15 years after it launched in 2007.