Mobile Money as a Strategy for Financial Inclusion in Rural Communities

Abstract

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the usage level of mobile money, and how it has accelerated financial inclusion among the rural communities in an emerging economy such as Zimbabwe. The study employed a mixed methods approach and a concurrent dominant status design where quantitative and qualitative approaches were concurrently used with the quantitative approach having a dominant status. The study was carried out in the Midlands Province and a simple random sampling technique was applied to select the province. Eight districts in the province formed the study population of 262 493 households and a pilot sample size of 37 household was chosen. The study used a survey method to collect data, where a questionnaire and focus group discussions were used as the main data collection instruments. It emerged that the usage of mobile money by the unbanked rural people is very high, especially for sending and receiving remittances. However the saving and loan aspect of mobile money were not very popular. Users were still relying on their traditional methods of savings and borrowing. The implications are that the service providers need to increase their awareness programs targeting this specific market to encourage them to migrate from traditional ways to safe and secure way of saving their meagre income. More so, that their saving patterns will determine their access to loans.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n25p216