by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Intellectual
Most regulators write the rules before a market forms. Somalia is doing it in the opposite order, and that reversal is the strategic story. On 27 February 2021, the Central Bank of Somalia issued the country’s first mobile-money licence, bringing formal...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Profiles
The hardest test of an institution is whether it can repeat a good outcome without the person who first delivered it. Somalia’s payment economy ran for years on the drive of individual operators who built mobile money into a national habit, largely outside a...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Lifestyle
The clearest sign of how money works in a place is what happens at the counter of a small shop. In Somalia, a customer settles with a phone rather than notes, and for years that daily act ran on a channel with no formal rulebook behind it. On 27 February 2021, the...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Content
A claim is only as strong as the document behind it, and much of what is said about Somalia’s economy rests on estimate rather than record. Mobile money has run the country’s payments for years with little formal reporting to anchor the numbers. On 27...
by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 25, 2020 | Economics
An economy can grow for years and still not compound. Somalia’s ports, telecoms and traders expanded through three decades of arrears, but without formal international finance the gains never converted into the productive capacity that lifts a whole market. On...