The Universal Postal Union and PlaNet Finance today officially launched a project in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to improve money transfers and financial inclusion in Africa.
The three-year project, mostly financed by close to 1.5 million euros from the European Union, should strengthen the capacity of Posts in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali to provide money transfers better adapted to customers’ needs, especially migrant workers and their families.
“We want to increase Posts’ ability to offer secure and affordable financial services that encourage citizens, especially migrant workers, to use formal financial networks,” explains Mansour Gueye, who oversees projects in African and least developed countries at the UPU. “We are convinced that postal financial services promote financial inclusion and contribute to reducing the cost of money transfers in the world, given that money transfers are an important source of financing for the economies of developing countries.”
Concretely, the project partners will continue to develop the electronic postal money transfer service currently being exchanged on the UPU’s international network using software provided by its Postal Technology Centre.
The project will help equip some 200 post offices in the four targeted African countries with electronic payment terminals. These easy-to-use terminals will enable postal staff in rural areas to perform money transfers more effectively, instead of dealing with a call centre located in an urban centre.
The UPU will also work on improving the quality of financial services by conducting audits in post offices to review management procedures.
The partners also commit to working with migrant associations to raise awareness of financial issues among more than 50,000 people in targeted countries and direct them towards savings and insurance products.
“People’s safety is often tied to the money they have, as savings help them prepare for the future and that of their children,” says PlaNet Finance’s director general, Joël Pain. “While these notions may be simple, they are not however necessarily intuitive. It is important to help the most vulnerable members of society gain access to financial education to complete the money-transfer experience that is the daily lot of millions of migrants and that shapes the lives of recipients and maintains the social link of members of the diaspora,” he added.
According to a UPU study, Posts and their financial arms, thanks to their extensive reach, come only second to banks in their potential to contribute to financial inclusion, far ahead of microfinance institutions, providers of mobile financial services and other suppliers of financial services. Even if more than 1.5 billion people in the world have a postal savings account, Posts are underused for financial inclusion, according to the UPU, which feels postal financial services could bring unbanked citizens into formal financial systems.