Kenyan Godfrey Madigu, PhD student of the Navarra Center for International Development (NCID) of the University of Navarra, has participated for six weeks in project on financial Education for the rural population in Mozambique, implemented by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). The NCID is one of the eight projects of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), the research center in Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Navarra,

"The goal is to test the relevance of financial Education for entrepreneurial microentrepreneurs," explains Godfrey Madigu. The project collects data microeconomics through a procedure called Randomized Controlled Trial, a subject of assessment impact that uses random assignment to implement programs or policies.

"This experience," she clarified, "has helped me to know exactly what subject problem we are facing. I was also able to see how data is collected at a micro level and what problems arise". According to him, the big challenge when interviewing people is to ask the right questions and know how to collect the answers well.

The project implemented by the Portuguese academic center for the past year is funded by the Government of Mozambique, the Mozambican telephone company Cateira Móvel and the International Growth Center. 

More than 500 mobile users

According to agreement with a working paper by NCID's partner Pedro Vicente, access to financial services in sub-Saharan Africa is very limited: less than one in five households has a bank account, making savings more difficult. Precisely, the project in which PhD student has participated seeks to educate people in financial concepts: "They are taught a series of concepts such as direct costs, profits and losses of their businesses".

group They are also shown the different ways of saving, including savings groups among a small group of people(Rotating Savings and Credit Association -ROSCA), the banks themselves and the M-Kesh system, a telephone banking service that makes it possible to manage the bank account on the handset and therefore has great potential for encouraging savings. There are more than 500 million cell phone users in Africa.