reb-ika/ethiopia-fi-forecast

# Forecasting Financial Inclusion in Ethiopia A forecasting system that tracks Ethiopia's digital financial transformation, predicting Account Ownership (Access) and Digital Payment Adoption (Usage) through 2027, with an interactive dashboard for non-technical stakeholders. ## Business Problem Ethiopia is in the middle of a fintech boom — Telebirr alone has over 54 million users, and M-Pesa has added 10 million more since 2023 — yet only 49% of Ethiopian adults hold a financial account, just 3 percentage points above 2021. Banks, mobile money operators, and regulators (the intended users of this system: a consortium including the National Bank of Ethiopia) lack a reliable way to see whether current products and policies are actually closing this gap, or to plan for where inclusion is headed next. ## Solution Overview The project ingests Ethiopia's financial inclusion data (Findex survey results, operator reports, and cataloged policy/product events), enriches it with additional research from GSMA, EthSwitch, and Ethiopia's Fayda digital ID program, and builds three layers of analysis: (1) exploratory analysis of Access and Usage trends, (2) an event-impact model estimating how specific events (e.g. Telebirr's launch) affected outcomes, validated against real historical data, and (3) trend-based forecasts with scenario ranges for 2025-2027. All of this is exposed through a 5-page interactive Streamlit dashboard, including a what-if scenario explorer. ## Key Results - Access (Account Ownership) forecast to reach **56.0%** by 2027 under the base case — **14 percentage points short** of the 70% NFIS-II policy target - Validated the Telebirr launch's impact estimate against real data, and **corrected an overstated assumption** (revised from "high" to "low" magnitude) after finding post-launch Access growth actually decelerated relative to pre-launch - Identified a ~50-point gap between registered mobile money accounts (~70% of adults) and Findex-measured account …