Mobile money in Africa
非洲时兴手机钱包

Press 1 for modernity
按“1”键来接受新事物

One business where the poorest continent is miles ahead
有一项业务，最贫穷的大陆却遥遥领先
Apr 28th 2012 | from the print edition

MANY people know that “mobile money”—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels.

很多人都知道，非洲很流行“手机钱包”，即用手机进行支付及转账等金融交易。“手机钱包”在非洲虽然兴起已久，却仍令我们感到惊奇。全球最常使用手机钱包的国家中，有四分之三都在非洲，其中某些国家的移动银行水平已经相当发达。


A new survey of global financial habits by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and Gallup World Poll found 20 countries in which more than 10% of adults say they used mobile money at some point in 2011. Of those, 15 are African. In Kenya, Sudan and Gabon half or more of adults used mobile money. In contrast, in countries with more developed financial systems, the share of adults who use mobile money is tiny—1% in Brazil and Argentina. If you think of banking by phone as just a way of using financial services, then these African countries—where people sometimes live several days’ walk from the nearest branch—are much more financially literate than you might think, just by looking at how many banks they have.

比尔盖茨基金会（Gates Foundation,）、世界银行（World Bank）以及盖普勒民意测验(Gallup poll)针对全球20个国家的金融服务使用习惯进行了一次全新调查，结果显示，超过10%的成年人表示他们在2011年使用过手机钱包。这20个国家有15个在非洲。在肯尼亚、苏丹和加蓬，一半以上的成年人都曾使用手机钱包。相比之下，在金融体系更为发达的巴西和阿根廷这些国家里，成年人使用手机钱包的比例非常低，只有1%。如果你把手机钱包看做这些非洲国家使用金融服务的方式之一，那么看看这些国家里到底有多少家银行，你就会认识到这些国家对财务知识的了解程度大大超出你的想象。这些国家的居民住所到最近的银行有时候要走上几天。

Most mobile-phone transactions are tiny. Market traders, for example, use mobile phones to pay peasant farmers for a single bag of cassava or maize-meal. One of the most successful mobile-phone products in Kenya is a SIM card costing just a few cents—but that is all people need for the occasional transaction. Mobile phones are also used to bank remittances from family members abroad. This may explain why mobile money has done so well in Somalia, a country which barely has a government, but where a third of adults said they used mobile money last year. Somalia is one of the countries that most depends on remittances: one study found that 80% of the capital for start-up firms came from the diaspora. Without mobile banking, this lifeline would be weaker than it is.

大部分手机汇款的金额都很小。就拿市场商贩来说，他们向农民买一袋子木薯或玉米粉，就会使用手机向农民付款。在肯尼亚，SIM卡是卖得最好的手机产品之一，虽然只要几分钱，但只要人们偶尔需要使用手机汇款，这个卡就必不可少。人们还会用手机来接收居住在海外的家人汇来的钱款。这也是为何在索马里手机钱包如此受欢迎的原因，索马里经常处于无ZF状态，三分之一的成年人称他们去年使用过手机钱包。在众多以汇款为生的国家里，索马里就是其中之一：研究发现，80%的公司注册资本都来自海外。要感谢手机钱包，否则索马里的生活水平将更加糟糕。

For the most part, mobile-phone money is a substitute both for paper-based banks and for, say, sending cash via a bus driver. It enables people who cannot get to a branch or ATM to use financial services. This helps offset the bias of the banking system towards the well educated. In Africa only about 10% of people with primary or no education have bank accounts, compared with 55% of those with tertiary education. But rates of phone banking in some countries are high enough to prove that the practice is spreading beyond university graduates to the rest of the population.

对于大多数用户来说，手机钱包是传统银行的替代品，有了它，人们不再需要通过公交司机捎带现金。人们去不了银行或者使用自动提款机交易，就可以使用手机钱包。以往，受过教育的人才懂得如何使用银行服务，现在手机钱包消除了这种差别。在非洲，在只有小学文化或者文盲的人群中，只有10%的人拥有银行账户，而受过高等教育的人群中这个比例是55%。在某些国家，手机钱包的使用率非常高，这足以证明，除了受过高等教育的人，更多的人都有这种理财习惯。

Sometimes, though, mobile banking goes hand in hand with the familiar kind. In Kenya, where a staggering 68% of adults use mobile money (by far the highest rate in the world, partly because regulation is extremely light), more than 40% also have ordinary bank accounts. The leapfrogging technology can also help the old-fashioned kind it has just vaulted over.

有时候，手机钱包这种方式会在具有相似性的人群中流传使用。在肯尼亚，68%的成年人都在使用手机钱包，这是一个惊人的数字（到目前为止，这一比例位居世界第一，而究其原因还在于肯尼亚的相关管理极为松散），超过40%的人同时还拥有普通账户。这种跨越式科技可以帮助那些老派的人接受新事物。