Tag Archive for: africa

Star Contributor of the Month – Mexina Daniel

 

We’re recognizing Mexina Daniel of Singo Africa from Dar es Salaam, as our Star Contributor. Mexina has been one of our most active community members, making a storm of contribution on our mailing lists, wiki, and issue trackers in her role as lead software developer. She has reported nearly 3 dozen bugs, requested multiple new features including specifications for Fixed Asset Management, and fixed 10 bugs. Mexina is thorough in all her work and deeply committed to the community. Join us in thanking Mexina for her valuable efforts and we look forward to more of her leadership as Singo Africa expands its presence in Tanzania and beyond.  Read more

Summiting the Silicon Mountain in Cameroon

ayukThis a guest post from Ayuk Etta Akum, the CEO and Founder of Skylabase which is an IT Company in Cameroon, Africa that provides technologies for financial inclusion.

A year ago, I discovered financial inclusion, the movement to end poverty in the world. Then I decided to build my company on this movement. The beauty of financial inclusion is the ability to make a very large change in the world in a very critical sector with the least technology possible. For us to embark on this journey we needed years of experience from experts and key players in this movement and we discovered this in the Mifos Initiative, a key player in the world today for the financial inclusion movement. They opened to us a door of experience to meet people with over 50 years experience in the credit union movement, finance experts, banking experts, and a complete banking engine to start from.

The hard part was for us to be open and join the movement by seriously engaging in the community, and from this came Smartfinance which is a centralized and extendable banking platform for credit unions, microfinance institutions, and banks. Our goal and vision of smartfinance is for it to be the microfinance platform for Cameroon and CEMAC region of Africa and ultimately move across Africa. Our partnership with the Mifos Initiative helped us to come out with a platform that will be the future of finance management in Cameroon and the CEMAC region in Africa. We are integrating into this platform mobile money, money transfer, USSD connectors, all the features to make Smartfinance a full-fledged banking platform while giving back to the Mifos Initiative community. Read more

2014 Mifos Annual Report

2014 was a breakthrough year for our community as the Mifos X platform established a foothold around the globe and we proved that a platform-centric and partner-driven approach can achieve tremendous scale and impact. Take a few moments to look back at the major milestones from the past year and all the community members who made these accomplishments possible.

At a glance in 2014

  • 2.6 million clients were reached by 110 financial institutions supported by 40 local tech partners across 33 different countries.
  • 80,000,000 transactions were processed on the platform with more than $791,000,000 in loans being managed.
  • 11,630 downloads of our software from 150 countries

2014 Mifos Summit – Kampala, Uganda

We’re excited to be hosting our third annual summit and coming to Africa for the first time. Raj Jain and the team at Yako Microfinance will welcome us to Kampala, Uganda for our annual gathering to unite our community across the world who are using, supporting, and building the Mifos X platform to advance technology-enabled financial inclusion. Once again our summit will be four days long from October 14 to October 17.

Apart from the opportunity to network and connect with fellow community members, this year will have an even larger focus on hands-on training for partners and users, collaborative tech sessions for contributors, & educational sessions led by external experts from the fin-tech & financial inclusion sector.

As we look to stimulate and grow our East African community, one entire day of the summit will be focused on building awareness of Mifos X for the local East Africa region including an Expo Hall for our partners to showcase their solutions to local and regional financial institutions.

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Profamilia Goes Live with Mifos in Mozambique

IMG-20110808-00006Great news from Mozambique as we have another Mifos deployment live and another Mifos user to welcome to the community.  Miguel and Natu from Iniciativa Mifos Moçambique just finished implementing Mifos at Profamilia Moçambique.  Miguel is leading efforts to promote and distribute Mifos all throughout Southern Africa – his team has successfully brought the Mifos technology to Associação Progresso in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique and to Kongalend Financial Services in Namibia. Beyond Mozambique, their team is seeking out additional Mifos users to add to the community in Zambia and Cape Verde.

Profamilia Moçambique’s microfinance operations serve the province of Inhambane, benefiting the populations of the districts of Inhambane, Zavala, Inharime, Morrumbene through the provision of more inclusive financial services. They target their solidarity group loans at low income customers, particularly women.

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GSOC Mentor Summit 2010

For the second year, Adam Monsen and I attended the Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit. This year’s summit was held on October 23 and 24, at Google Headquarters.

We knew more what to expect this year, and maybe that’s why I felt I even got more out of this year’s meetings. Last year, I kind of stood back and attended a few of the sessions I was interested in. This year, in addition to attending some cool sessions, I hosted two sessions:  “GSOC in Africa” (http://openetherpad.org/gsoc-in-africa), and “Audio and Video for Distributed Teams” (http://openetherpad.org/AudioVideoDistributedTeams) .

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Tag Archive for: africa