Facing Global Challenges

Africa benefits from several positive trends – including a growing, youthful workforce, plentiful natural resources and seven of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies – but the continent also faces some serious challenges, not least bottlenecks caused by infrastructure problems, low levels of intra-Africa trade and vulnerability to commodity price falls. So the theme for this year’s ARC is Africa – Facing Global Challenges. Our opening plenary will therefore set the scene by discussing the ‘Mega Trends’ that are having the biggest impact on the global economy and shaping Africa’s future. We will look at topics as transformative as enabling technology, the rise of the middle class, urbanisation and economic interconnectedness, climate change and resource stress.

This year’s agenda will feature a presentation of new research sponsored by the SWIFT Institute.

SWIFT Institute Session

Measuring the Impact of Mobile Banking on Financial Inclusion

The SWIFT Institute will present new research that derived from a session on financial inclusion at ARC 2015 in Cape Town. Following last year’s event we issued a grant on the impact of technological and business model innovations on levels of financial inclusion and poverty reduction. This research documents and analyses mobile banking because this technology offers great promise in overcoming geographic, demographic and institutional constraints to financial inclusion. The focus of this research is on sub-Saharan Africa, through the lens of Kenya.

• Jay Rosengard, Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government’s Financial Sector Program, Harvard Kennedy School

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