The closest banks to some Northerners in the rural areas are miles away and may take several hours to complete the round trip.
Creative Associates International, an organisation that provides outstanding, on-the-ground development services and partnerships to deliver sustainable solutions to global challenges has sought to find a local financial technology solution that leveraged the mobile phone to bridge the access in Northern Nigeria.
As part of the USAID-funded Northern Education Initiative Plus (NEI), Creative Associates International and its partners are strengthening the ability of Bauchi and Sokoto states to provide greater access to basic education-especially for those affected by conflict- and to improve reading outcomes for school-aged children and youth.
To support them, the project pays Learning Facilitators a stipend of 10,000 Naira per month (approximately $27).
Due to the lack of formal banking institutions, the Learning Facilitators finds it hard to access financial services and get paid for their work. It’s a challenge facing an innovative education project in two Nigerian states.
Through its non-formal learning centers, NEI Plus provides learning opportunities to children and youth who are not able to attend the formal school system. They are taught by Learning Facilitators, 87 percent of whom live in rural areas.
To ensure payments make it to these financially underserved educators facing this access gap of traditional banking channels, Creative is leveraging mobile phones.
Mobile phone ownership in Nigeria is relatively high (83 percent according to the World Bank), giving NEI Plus the option to build upon the already established mobile money channels. The NEI Plus collaborated with the company eTranzact to provide a customized, tailored payment solution.
As they were financially underserved, the majority of Learning Facilitators had never used mobile money before. To ensure sufficient uptake of the product for the project use case and beyond, the NEI Plus designed and deployed mobile money training for the educators. The training included sections relevant to their uses: digital financial literacy, mobile money uses, mobile savings, and mobile value-added services.
Recent survey revealed that the Learning Facilitators enjoy receiving their stipends via mobile money. One facilitator noted that he liked having his stipend immediately available on his phone so that he could choose what to do with it, another noted that he liked the security provided via mobile money.
The mobile money deployment was also new for this region of Nigeria. “For example, the mobile money infrastructure (mobile money agents, etc.) that was rolled out to support our disbursements was the first to be deployed to both Bauchi and Sokoto states – an important first step for further financial inclusion,” Creative said.
The use of mobile money by the Initiative comes at a critical time in the development of financial inclusion in Nigeria. The Government of Nigeria, via the Central Bank of Nigeria, is supporting mobile money operators to expand throughout the country, but predominantly in the northern areas. Through their involvement in this Initiative, eTranzact is now well-positioned to future work with the Central Bank.
The apex bank rolled out a Shared Agent Network Expansion Facility that aims to onboard 40 million low-income, under- and unserved Nigerians into the formal financial system, including increasing financial access points (mobile money agents, ATMs, etc.) from the current 50,000 to 500,000. eTranzact was certified by the Central Bank as one of 10 mobile money operators and super agents to rollout additional agent locations within the next 24 months.
