Digital Innovation Ecosystem Development for Financial Inclusion and Market Access: The Case of Tanzania

There is now consensus that innovative financial services that are provided in a more equitable and inclusive way are the cornerstone of social and economic development. In this regard, although Tanzania has recorded a significant growth in the level of financial service provision and has reached out to a good number of people in the country, especially through digital means, the country might not benefit from this wide coverage of financial services because it faces a glaring gap in inclusiveness. The reasons for the persistence of such exclusion in spite of policies to address the challenges are not clearly known. This work is an attempt to close this knowledge gap basically towards understanding the factors contributing to both gender and location-related exclusion with the purpose to inform inclusion policies. The findings indicate that the major challenges revolve around inappropriate marketing strategies for the digital financial services for the poor; inappropriate products in terms of price and context fitness; and cost related to product development and service provision on the part of the providers. The existing inclusion policies did not seem to have helped much as they have some serious gaps in their design.