About HiPipo Foundation

HiPipo is a leading digital age organisation with operations covering digital, financial inclusion, inclusive finance, events, awards and music. And through its Include Everyone program it is keen to promote and advocate for adoption of secure digital financial services because of the vital role they play in promoting financial inclusion. We maintain our works as charitable and public goods in service of digital and financial inclusion. Globally, HiPipo is now widely recognised as a visible and proactive advocate for digital innovation, #FinTech and #FinancialInclusion.

HiPipo focuses on improving low income users’ access to digital financial services, such as mobile money wallets, mobile bank accounts and digital payment systems. We place strong emphasis on empowering the underserved and unbanked, including special interest groups like women, persons with disabilities, youth, informal traders, local artisans, musicians, sportspersons and subsistence farmers.

We are a constantly evolving organisation that responds to the needs of our community. We identify with the poor, the disadvantaged, the powerless, the afflicted, the oppressed, the marginalized citizen especially women, girls and children. We have special concern to children, orphans, vulnerable children, youths and the elderly and use our team members’ extensive knowledge and experience in technology and ICTs to advocate for the needs our community thus empowering them. We respect the equal God-given rights and dignity for both women and men.

We view women and girls as agents of change for their own individual and collective empowerment rather than seeing them as beneficiaries of our activities and as such, we put women and girls at the center of our discussions, participation and implementation of the solutions we come up with. Our activities boost social transformation, hence ultimately enhancing the control that women and girls have over their own lives.

We advocate for women’s inclusion in digital financial services as a way to boost women’s participation in agriculture, health, education and leadership and as such, HiPipo empowers the next generation of women and girls.

Our strategy is aimed at ensuring that women have more access to and use of digital financial services, such as mobile money wallets, mobile bank accounts and digital payment systems, to close the persistent gender gap in financial inclusion.

HiPipo is keen to promote secure digital financial services because of their vital role in promoting financial inclusion. Thus, “Maximizing the Digital Dividend with Digital Innovations for Financial Inclusion” is the theme for Include Everyone program. We therefore ensure that all the projects/events we organize are structured to meet this theme targets.

HiPipo through its Include Everyone program identifies, analyzes, and prioritizes trends and innovations in digital financial services (DFS) that have potential impact on financial inclusion in Africa. The primary objective is to flag, advocate for and shine a light on impactful and transformative directions in the financial inclusion arena.

Our aim is to influence and shape financial technology and policy decisions within regulators, policy makers, government, political, economic, and social systems and institutions.

Include Everyone program helps in scaling Digital Financial Services in Africa through, advising financial inclusion stakeholders such as regulators, operators, banks and FinTechs, researching and publishing DFS reports, organizing awareness events for stakeholders and creating awareness content.

OUR VISION

Our vision is to spearhead the emergence of the African continent into fully maximising its digital dividend and potential, with the entire populace equitably participating in the use, leverage, dissemination, innovation, adoption and adaptation of secure digital financial services to improve their lives and livelihoods.

OUR MISSION

Our mission is to identify, nurture and/or assist digital innovation stakeholders as they seek to build interoperable systems and solutions that will positively transform societies, trigger the empowerment of all persons and communities, and assist in the attainment of sustainable development goals.

What we do

  1. We advocate for Financial Technology to work and to improve the lives of the poor.
  2. We advise ecosystem stakeholders about how to best develop DFS Systems that are Pro-Poor by carrying out impact and value assessment studies on various digital financial products and services in Africa.
  3. We promote making of DFS systems that are open and interoperable, offer real time clearing, use push payment model, ensure same day settlement, are KYC Tiered with shared interoperability and fraud management infrastructure/plan and systems that work with an understandable cost recovery based shared infrastructure for collaborative space.
  4. We help stakeholders in developing frameworks for scaling DFS in Africa, through training, organizing events such as the Include Everyone summits, women, refugees and youth workshops and Hackathon.
  5. We reach out the largest number of FinTechs in Africa, both global and indigenous and provide a leveled platform for them to showcase their innovations, to share knowledge, and we celebrate the most outstanding financial technology products through our annual Digital Impact Awards Africa project.
  6. We advocate for and offer quality but affordable education
  7. We Empower women, children and youths with leaderships, life and vocational skills to support Human Capital Development
  8. We create digital tools to help bring health services closer to the poor.
  9. We offer apprenticeship, internship and mentorship opportunities for fresh graduates
  10. We organise empowerment camps for out-of-school youth and holiday camps for school going children
  11. We conduct public engagement meetings in order to understand the real problems that need to be addressed
  12. We train and conduct scientific research pertaining to all human development needs
  13. We promote, advocate and support education of vulnerable children at different levels of education
  14. We conduct character formation and values development sessions in schools and organisations
  15. We write and publish studies, reports for both local and international markets

Why Include Everyone Advocacy?

Include Everyone provides advocacy support for all stakeholders in the financial technology ecosystem.

Our Advocacy Aims are,

  • To ensure that consumers, women, youth, refugees and particularly the poorest members in African society are helped to have access to the most affordable financial services.
  • We advocate for enabling fintech regulations and implementable policies to drive usage while defending and safeguarding consumer rights.
  • Through research we gather views and wishes of DFS stakeholders and consumers and ensure they are genuinely considered when policy decisions are being made.
  • We identify, analyze and prioritize trends and innovation that have capacity to transform the financial inclusion arena and we create awareness for the same.
  • We advocate for stability of DFS ecosystem growth.

We further promote financial technology to help in serving agricultural development, accessibility of affordable education, health services, safe water and, energy plus promoting gender equality through empowering women with financial education, reliable and secure digital financial tools.

Our desire is to see FinTech stakeholders develop and provide DFS Payment Systems that are accessible, reliable, secure, available, valuable with a clear value preposition for the poor to use DFS rather than cash or other traditional services and affordable in that users get more value in excess of cost of service but also profitable to ensure that investors in digital financial services earn sustainable margins.

We envision that our input will play a role to impact lives in the ways below,

  1. Fewer families slide into poverty and daily consumption is gradually increased because of their use of DFS products and services.
  2. More households use DFS to save, get loans, access insurance, manage finance and easily recover from income and expense shocks such as sickness, accidents, death of dependable family members etc.
  3. More household would have better quality of life through agricultural development, affordable education, health services, safe water, and energy whose delivery is facilitated by affordable digital financial services.
  4. That education practically becomes a human right that everyone must access.
  5. That healthcare services are accessible by every single world citizen in the most affordable way they can.

How we do it

We organize events, such as digital financial literacy workshops, Hackathon, awards, and also carry out humanitarian impact-oriented studies. We also support in development of products POCs for financial inclusion.

  • With whom we do it

We work and partner with global development agencies and foundations that desire to transform the financial inclusion landscape in Africa, international financial institutions, regulators in telecom, central banks, governments, operators, banks, FinTechs, developers communities and consumers.

  • When we do it

We work 365 days every year on ensuring financial inclusion gets better in Africa. Our Annual program is published at the end of January.

Projects

  1. Financial Inclusion Impact Research: Each year we pick a research topic for which we measure financial inclusion impact.  Our Digital Impact Awards Africa research for Time Saving Capacity of Mobile Money was referenced in the GSMA[1] 2017 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money.
  2. Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit: The yearly summit is planned to be a strategic gathering of for profit and not for profit leaders of financial inclusion, public and private sector organizations, banking and telecom operators from across Africa.
  3. Digital Impact Awards Africa: Our annual research-based awards project celebrates and promotes excellence in product, services and innovation for Financial Inclusion. Previous M-Pesa [2] Co-Initiators and promoters Mr. Michael Joseph, Ms Susie Lonie , Dr. Nick Hughes  have given remarks at our awards events that are also attended by big brands in financial inclusion space.
  4. Digital and Financial Inclusion Expo: The expo aims to bring together organizations yearly to show case new developments, products, services and innovations that are aimed at promoting financial inclusion.
  5. Interoperability and Open API Hackathon: Hackathon for FinTechs and developers with innovative ideas to create new, compelling financial applications and products using OPEN API, GSMA API and/or Mojaloop Technology.
  6. Public Challenge/Contests: The Include Everyone program public contests/challenges will reach out to key segments of community such as youth, women, farmers to participant in  Financial Inclusion Challenges/Contests which will enable us get the voices, minds and views of these people about what needs to be done to better financial inclusion for them.

[1] https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/GSMA_2017_State_of_the_Industry_Report_on_Mobile_Money_Full_Report.pdf

[2] http://www.digital-impact-awards.com/keynotes/

[1] https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/GSMA_2017_State_of_the_Industry_Report_on_Mobile_Money_Full_Report.pdf

[2] http://www.digital-impact-awards.com/keynotes/