Building financial Inclusion in the Kingdom of Eswatini
Professor Akinnuwesi and his team are applying machine learning to the problem of financial inclusion in the Kingdom of Eswatini. Expanding access to appropriate financial services supports the Academy’s strategic goal of creating an equal society. The DIA programme creates opportunities for the team to network, strengthen existing collaborations and create research engagement to broaden the links between the University of Eswatini (UNESWA), the UK, and the Academy to share their research outputs. The grant will help to enable, strengthen and implement the project and support organising training, workshops, seminars, communication, and public engagement during the proposed project’s two-year term.
Financial inclusion
Financial inclusion (FI) is the availability and equality of opportunities for individuals, households and businesses to access financial products and services at an affordable rate and at an appropriate time. Over the years, a lack of preprocessing of FI datasets has degenerated the quality of those datasets. Preprocessing of the FI datasets using computational systems helps to improve their quality by resolving issues such as missing values, clustering and imbalanced data.
Machine learning is helping to re-engineer financial products. It accurately preprocesses FI datasets to enhance the performance of the proposed machine learning model that will be used to provide relevant information for financial governance. Furthermore, the project will help to develop a unique machine learning engineering-based, FI application software that can guide FI, improving access to financial products and services for low-income earners in the Kingdom of Eswatini. This will reflect the Academy’s strategic goals of creating an equal society by helping to increase FI.
Professor Akinnuwesi is collaborating with colleagues at UNESWA, the Mount Royal University, Calgary, and the University of Coventry. The DIA programme supported project will help to broaden the links between UNESWA, the UK, and the Academy to share research outputs and organise training, workshops, seminars, communication, and public engagement activities that support FI and sustainable economy in the rural communities.
Initial findings
The project’s initial data analysis reviewed critical factors, such as social, political and environmental, from data collected in four constituencies in the Kingdom. The findings and outputs from the first phase of the data analysis were: (a) more employment should be created to reduce the unemployment rate in the rural communities and contribute to economic growth; (b) provision of more credit facilities at low interest rate for MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) to thrive in rural communities is very important; (c) banks should be advised to minimise charges per transaction to encourage people to own bank accounts in rural communities; and (d) use of mobile money/MoMo is high in rural communities because charges are relatively small compared to the bank charges per transaction. The project team members led by Professor Akinnuwesi have presented the above initial project outcomes to the management of Centre for Financial Inclusion in Eswatini and at the Deep Learning Indaba conference 2022.
“FI is identified as a key indicator of inclusive growth in governance and the schemes align with six out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and main objectives of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as instruments for promoting economic growth and sustainable development.”
Next phases
These findings are being fed into the next stages of the project. The application software is being developed and the team is presenting a workshop on the prototype testing, implementation and use later in 2023. Looking further ahead, the team hopes the proposed system will be an information repository and retrieval system for financial products and services. This can then be used to guide the decision of Central Banks in formulating fiscal policies to enhance MSMEs and improve financial inclusion for the Kingdom of Eswatini.