Is there a bottleneck for mobile money adoption in WAEMU?

Abstract

The main vision of governments in the countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) is to include financially the unbanked adult populations by developing digital financial services. This paper aims then at investigating the driving factors of mobile money adoption and the policies package that may alleviate the bottlenecks of the low digital financial inclusion in that area. Using both country and individual-level data from the World Bank database, we made first, a cluster analysis and thereafter a logistic regression to investigate both the macroeconomic and microeconomic driven factors of mobile money adoption. We found that country characteristic including literacy rate, labour force, mobile infrastructure and banking infrastructure in terms of numbers of ATM per 1,00,000 people are the main macroeconomic determinants of mobile money adoption. In addition, being young, man, educated, relatively richer and even banked increases the likelihood of adopting mobile money in WAEMU.

Keywords:

• Mobile money
• cluster analysis
• dendrogram
• clogit
• WAEMU

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melain Modeste Senou

Melain Modeste SENOU, Assistant Researcher in the Economics Department at Felix Houphoüet Boigny University, Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Wautabouna Ouattara

Wautabouna OUATTARA, Full Professor in the Economics Department at Felix Houphoüet Boigny University, Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Denis Acclassato Houensou

Denis Acclassato, Full professor in the Economics Department at the University of Abomey Calavi, Cotonou, Benin.