Microfinance Focus, September 20, 2011: There are high concentrations of financial service providers in East and West Africa, but significant gaps in Central and parts of Southern Africa, says the MIX report on the financial inclusion in Africa.

In partnership with the MasterCard Foundation, MIX (Microfinance Information Exchange) has launched the Africa Map for Financial Inclusion for the Poor. The map aggregates data from surveys conducted on an expansive list of 23, 000 African financial providers.

According to the report’s findings, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have the largest gaps between populations living in poverty and those with access to financial services - 80 million in Nigeria and 48 million in the Congo.

In Nigeria, the gap exists despite the distribution of hundreds of microfinance providers across the country. The situation in the Congo is similar, with data on almost 200 credit unions and several dozen NGOs in our sample.

Conversely, Cape Verde and Kenya are the only markets in which the number of accounts exceeds the population living below the national poverty line (since an individual can have more than one account). For Kenya, this is in part due to the outreach of mobile banking, which has only recently been linked with savings or credit services.

The reports highlights that the financial institutions targeting the poor manage over 71 million accounts across sub-Saharan Africa. The sector has a reach that covers 44 million deposit accounts and 20 million loans.

The vast majority of the institutions are small credit unions. They serve the most in the aggregate, although most are small and many sectors have little or no presence from this model

Most sectors have a diverse set of providers, covering a range of institutions offering different products - no single model dominates overall.

Savings products are mostly offered through networks of thousands of cooperatives that reach 18 million people, but also through savings banks, commercial banks, postal savings banks, regulated MFIs and informal savings groups, each of which provide between 4 to 6 million more accounts. Most credit comes from banks and specialized microfinance institutions.

While the number of mobile banking projects remains small, their reach is broad and this sector covers more than 18 million people. 12.6 million of these are reached through Safaricom’s M-Pesa product, with another five million via Vodacom and MTN products. Beyond these three, outreach is limited.