The roundtable is to highlight the recent advances made in Ghana towards leveraging digital financial services to increase financial inclusion from the standpoint of regulators and service provider.

It is also to understand from the point of view of the customer the benefits derived from Discover Financial Services and the challenges faced in the use of these products. The roundtable was organised under its Microlead project with support from the MasterCard foundation.

Mr Diawary Bouare, the Regional Director, CARE West Africa, speaking at the event, said no single government or development actor could only achieve the Goal One and eight of the SDGs. He said this would certainly require some deliberate collective efforts with greater synergy and complementarities.

The Regional Director said CARE in consultation with other partners had recently launched a regional initiative, aimed at scaling up this proven Village Savings and Loan Association approach towards reaching over 15 million by 2020.

He expressed the belief that Ghana could be one of the pioneering countries for this initiative and boost its current leadership role towards achieving its commitment for SDGs for others to learn from.

Mr Jim Baiden, Managing Director, Fidelity Bank, said Ghana mobile money had made significant impact on the ability for people to access financial services. “We have all seen the boom in the mobile money market in the last five years and now lots of people prefer to be paid through mobile money,” he added.  He said the lack of mobile phones could be a real challenge for the scaling up of digital finance.

Mr Nicholas Gyabaah, a Representative from the Ministry of Finance, said the Ministry was committed to providing an enabling environment where financial inclusion could strive. He said the Government had also developed policies and laws to take care of financial stability and other interventions in the focus on financial inclusion. Mr Joseph Bentor, a Representative from the National Insurance Commission said: “We are in the process of reviewing the laws to include micro insurance.”

He said the Commission was in the process of signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bank of Ghana and the National Communication Authority to regulate the telecommunication companies on issues of insurance.    UNCDF’s last mile financing models support digital finance innovations to reach unbanked, poor and remote populations who have been excluded from traditional financial networks.

Programmes funded under this window also recognise that financial intermediation could  be the missing link between adapted technologies and household access. This work is founded on supply and demand diagnostics that support governments to engage stakeholders in creating roadmaps for financial inclusion. These processes bring to the table Financial Service Providers (FSPs), insurance companies, mobile network operators, technology companies, agricultural suppliers, and remittance companies, as well as regulators, policymakers (such as ministries of telecommunications, agriculture, education, social welfare) and civil society actors like consumer associations and financial education providers.

Challenge funds support the development of new prototypes, and bring to scale viable business models that serve low-income consumers, medium, small and micro-enterprises (MSMEs), the un- and under - banked, especially women.