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TANZANIA, through TPB Bank has become one of the first three African countries to benifit from a MasterCard Foundation and Oxford Policy Management (OPM) initiative seeking to improve poor households' access to financial services in sb Saharan Africa. TPB will undertake the US$1 million (about 2.27bn/-) financial inclusion project in the country in collaoration with the saving at the Frontier (satF) programme, which is a partnership between Mstercard and OPM.
The latter is a British international development consulting firm that helps low and middle income countries achieve growth and reduce poverty through policy reform. Accordingly to senior SatF official, the local lender was picked to implement the projrct in Tanzania because of its innovative mobile banking service , TPB popote, which is targets sideline and undeserved communities especially those living in the remotest part of the country.''
TBP is the First partener institution that SatF will be working with Tanzania, Ghana and Zambia,''SatF programme Manager Steven Peachey said at the joint press conference on Friday in Dar es salaam to announce the partership between the two.'' Accordingly to him, ''what attracted SatF to partner with TPB is the way the bank wants to help individuals to create their own groups with financial linkage built in from the start.''
The Partnership between two Organizations will help to connect the bank with savings groups in the country. Its Overall goal is to help Tanzanians in rural and peri- urban areas to save money safely and conveniently through their mobile phones. On his part, the CEO of TPB, Sabasaba Moshingi, said TPB was the First Bank in Tanzaniato introduce mass market mobile banking under the TPB popote digital service. The bank has now created o group mobile platform that allows group to save, take loans and make contributions to their Social fund, via their moble phones. Moshingi said the joint financial inclusion project will start i Ruvuma and then expand to Mtwara, Lindi, Njombe, Iringa and Mororgoro.