Onyxge/Forecasting-Financial-Inclusion-in-Ethiopia

Building a forecasting system that tracks Ethiopia's digital financial transformation using time series methods # Ethiopia Financial Inclusion Forecasting (2025–2027) **Status:** Ongoing **Author:** Yonatan **Date:** February 2026 --- ## 1. Project Goal and Business Context ### The Problem Official financial inclusion data for Ethiopia (World Bank Global Findex) is sparse and outdated. The most recent official survey (2022) reports a stagnant account ownership rate of approximately **46 percent**, failing to capture the structural break introduced by the launch of **Telebirr (2021)** and **M-Pesa (2023)**. These platforms collectively onboarded more than **60 million users within four years**, creating a major disconnect between official inclusion metrics and observed digital financial behavior. ### The Solution This project develops a custom **Event-Augmented Forecasting Engine**. By enriching sparse survey-based indicators with high-frequency proxy data from mobile money operators and embedding causal impact rules, the system produces realistic forecasts for **2025–2027** that explicitly account for Ethiopia’s recent digital payments boom. --- ## 🚀 2. Project Methodology (Tasks) The project was executed in four rigorous phases: ### **Task 1: Data Enrichment (The "Rescue" Phase)** * **Goal:** Bridge the 2021–2024 data gap. * **Action:** We injected 8 high-confidence records into the dataset, including: * **Events:** Telebirr Launch (May 2021), Mandatory Fuel Payment (July 2023), M-Pesa Entry (Aug 2023). * **Proxies:** Operator-reported user counts (54M Telebirr users) and macroeconomic headwinds (30% Inflation). * **Outcome:** A "Model-Ready" dataset (`ethiopia_fi_enriched.csv`) that captures the digital boom. ### **Task 2: Exploratory Data Analysis (The "Insight" Phase)** * **Goal:** Validate the hypothesis. * **Key Insight:** We visualized the **"Inclusion Paradox"**—Account Ownership (Official) grew only +3% while Usage (Proxies) grew +5000%. * **Outcome:** Confirmed that "Registered Users" is a leading indicator for "Financial Access," validating our ratio- …