Senegal boasts a large and diverse financial landscape. Financial Inclusion Days brings attention to progress and opportunities for including more people in digital financial services.

Key questions

How do you engage the public, and in particular young people, on the opportunities offered by digital financial services, especially for entrepreneurship?

How do you strengthen the level of financial literacy of consumer associations regarding their contractual rights and obligations?

What is the role of business journalists in raising public awareness of tax compliance?

These questions, and many more, are at the heart of Financial Inclusion Days, organized from November 23 to 29 in Senegal.

Financial inclusion and DFS in Senegal

Financial inclusion and the use of digital financial services is increasing in Senegal, where positive developments have been recorded in recent years. The country presents a large and diverse financial landscape, in which people navigate between the use of financial institutions, formal and informal, digital and non-digital.

In 2018 for example, digital financial services experienced a significant increase.

The number of e-money accounts increased by 38% and active users grew by 23%. Similarly, the volume and value of transactions increased by 98.6% and 115.5% respectively to stand at 298.7 million transactions, valued at 2,718 billion CFA Francs. This makes the Senegalese market one of the most competitive in the UEMOA space and encourages players to innovate in terms of the financial services and products offered and in terms of partnerships. The Dakar bank was the first financial institution to launch its digital credit offer in 2018. During the month of October of the following year, the Pamecas / Intouch consortium took the lead by marketing its digital credit offer with the support of UNCDF.

However, this evolution of financial inclusion should not make us forget that a large part of Senegalese remain excluded from the formal financial sector. The profile of Senegalese officially included in finance is highly educated, urban, employed and male. Although Senegal has an overall financial inclusion index of 0.604, while the sub-regional average (UEMOA) is 0.4992, many challenges remain — especially in financial education.

Financial education: A major national challenge

The Financial Inclusion Days are timely, especially in the context of a health crisis that can contribute to the marginalization of the most vulnerable. The Observatory of the Quality of Financial Services (OQSF), in accordance with the exercise of its mission of promoting financial education, offers various awareness sessions for the general public, and in particular:

• A training session for journalists from the business press on entrepreneurial spirit and fiscal citizenship

• An awareness session for consumer associations on agreements and borrowing interest rates

• A workshop on the contribution of banks to financial inclusion

• A panel on "Financial Education, to promote domestic savings"

For UNCDF, which supports the Ministry of Economy and Finance in the development of the national financial inclusion strategy, this initiative is of great importance, because the financial education of the populations is a pillar of the development of financial inclusion. Clearly, good policies are not enough if the end user is not aware of the challenges and opportunities of the digital financial services available to them. When you are better informed about market practices, about your own rights and obligations, you are also more likely to trust digital financial service providers and thus contribute to the development of the banking and financial sector — and, ultimately , to the economic growth of the country as a whole.

UNCDF is ready to work on strengthening the financial consumer protection framework, a pillar of Senegal's national financial inclusion strategy that will be released in the coming weeks.

Read more updates from the UNCDF Policy Accelerator

Authors

Olivia-Kelly Lonkeu

Annie Mutamba

Alexis Ditkowsky