Cenfri

The Centre for Financial Regulation and Inclusion (Cenfri) is a leading Africa-based think tank seeking to spark financial market change for digital and financial inclusion, and to assist policymakers and regulators on evidence-informed decision making for responsible innovation. Under this program grant, Cenfri — in partnership with select government counterparts in East and West Africa — will explore a range of demonstration cases that build policymaker capacity in the big and alternative data space. Goals include developing a better understanding of the process and prerequisites for policymakers to shift their mindset and embrace big and alternative data for decision making, inform and optimize policymaking in the demonstration case policy areas, and contribute to the broader welfare-enhancing digital economy work occurring across the continent.

The Centre for Financial Regulation and Inclusion (CENFRI) is a leading Africa-based think-tank seeking to spark financial market change for digital and financial inclusion, and inform policymakers and regulators on evidence-informed decision making for responsible innovation. This grant will support a partnership between CENFRI and Smart Africa to look at the concept of open finance in the African context — that is, the sharing of consumer data between financial service providers and/or third-party providers on the basis of consumer consent. The project will conduct open finance market assessments and feasibility studies in two African countries, develop a tailored multiyear implementation plan for those countries (where appropriate) and build on the lessons from these to inform pan-African guidance on open finance. The goal of this project is to assess the feasibility, and design for the inclusive implementation of, open finance in African markets. This grant sits within a cluster of grants under the Evidence-Informed Policymaking strategy to strengthen a field of African institutions working on data governance. The goal of this cluster is to help governments in Africa develop policy frameworks that balance good uses of data with data privacy and protection; this will be the first grant in this cluster looking specifically at the financial data space.