• Economy,  Finance

    Banking the Unbanked: Mobile Finance as a Lifeline

    By Kwame Bolgatanga, Ghana — Under a baobab tree in the Upper East Region, 60-year-old Adiza Ibrahim punches numbers into her Nokia phone with focus. Seconds later, a text confirms her receipt of ₵150 via mobile money. The sender? Her son in Accra. “I don’t have a bank account,” she says in Mampruli through a translator. “But I can receive money on my phone.” Adiza is one of millions of Ghanaians who are part of a quiet financial revolution — where banks are not branches and wallets are not leather. Mobile finance has leapfrogged traditional banking, giving the unbanked unprecedented access to money services. The Unbanked Majority According to the…