meronsisay/ethiopia-fi-forecast

# Ethiopia Financial Inclusion — Forecasting System ## The Problem Ethiopia is in the middle of a fast digital financial transformation. Telebirr has grown to over 54 million users since 2021. M-Pesa entered the market in 2023 and already has 10+ million users. Interoperable P2P digital transfers have overtaken ATM cash withdrawals for the first time. And yet, per the 2024 Global Findex survey, only **49%** of Ethiopian adults have a financial account — just 3 percentage points higher than in 2021. Selam Analytics was engaged by a consortium of development finance institutions, mobile money operators, and the National Bank of Ethiopia to answer three questions: 1. **What drives financial inclusion in Ethiopia?** 2. **How do events** — product launches, policy changes, infrastructure investments — **affect inclusion outcomes?** 3. **How did inclusion change in 2025, and where is it headed in 2026-2027?** This repo builds a forecasting system that answers all three, using the World Bank's Global Findex framework's two core dimensions: - **Access** — Account Ownership Rate - **Usage** — Digital Payment Adoption Rate ## Approach Rather than a flat spreadsheet of numbers, the dataset uses a unified `observation` / `event` / `impact_link` / `target` schema, so that policies, product launches, and infrastructure milestones can be modeled as *drivers* of Access and Usage, not just listed alongside them. Events deliberately never get a pillar (Access/Usage/etc.) pre-assigned — Telebirr's launch, for example, affects both, so labeling it as one up front would bias the analysis before it starts. `impact_link` records carry that interpretation instead, each one joined back to its parent event via `parent_id`, with a direction, magnitude, lag, and evidence basis. ### Schema at a glance | record_type | `category` filled? | `pillar` filled? | What it represents | |---------------|---------------------|-------------------|---------------------| | `observation` | no …