Agricultural finance has been deemed a "policy orphan" in Africa. The lack of coordination among stakeholders further deters the process of establishing common guidelines that are necessary to pull the required public and private resources towards the achievement of a common goal: providing adequate and affordable financial services to the agricultural sector.

This post was originally published on the CGAP website. Thanks to the support of The MasterCard Foundation, since 2012 CGAP has been involved in the development of an ecosystem for digital financial services in the WAEMU region - a customs and monetary union between the countri

Financial inclusion institutions in emerging countries are increasingly important as expansive savings and investment vehicles for households and the public in general. A large part of these institutions carry out financial activities that play the part of bank credit, but within a regulatory framework that is either non-existent or much more lax than that which exists for formally-constituted banking institutions.

African banking sectors have witnessed significant changes in their structure over the past several decades with the penetration of regional cross-border banks. We have investigated whether these changes have led to more competition in the banking industry.