Assessing the impact of mobile money in Malawi - a case of Airtel money.

The advent of Mobile money revolution is sweeping the world today and this is evidenced by the fact that there are over 2 billion people having cell phones in a world where over 2.5 billion adults do not have bank accounts (Penn. M, 2011). The discovery and innovation of a mobile phone as a link to formal and informal financial services has brought about Mobile Money Transfer (Ghosh, I., 2012). Mobile Money Transfer aims at ensuring financial inclusion for the unbanked by facilitating convenient and efficient financial transactions for the economic empowerment of all people especially hard to reach communities. Notably, at global level, financial sector reforms that promote financial inclusion are increasingly at the core of the international development agenda for policy makers and development institutions (Ardic, O.P., et al, 2011). Thus, this study was undertaken to understand the Mobile money impact in Malawi with focus on Airtel Mobile Money. Both primary and secondary data provided valuable information from which findings were drawn. Among other things, the study indicated that Mobile money in Malawi has assisted in alleviating poverty by creating employment to some people and improving productivity through alternative means of paying bills without necessarily travelling far or handling cash insecurely apart from empowering the poor and unbanked with a secure , reliable and efficient mobile money transfer service. The conclusion however from the findings is that poor network availability is a deterrent to accessing mobile money as it also affects quality of the service thereby impacting negatively on customer satisfaction