Forecasting Financial Inclusion in Ethiopia
Time Series Modeling of Access and Digital Payment Usage (2025–2027)
🌍 Project Overview
This project builds a forecasting system to track and predict Ethiopia’s digital financial transformation using time series and intervention modeling techniques.
The system analyzes historical financial inclusion data and estimates how policies, product launches, and infrastructure investments influence two core dimensions defined by the World Bank Global Findex:
Access — Account Ownership Rate
Usage — Digital Payment Adoption Rate
The final output includes forecasts for 2025–2027, uncertainty bounds, and an interactive dashboard for stakeholder exploration.
🏢 Business Context
This work was conducted as part of a consulting engagement for Selam Analytics, supporting a consortium including:
National Bank of Ethiopia
Development finance institutions
Mobile money operators
Banking institutions
Ethiopia’s financial ecosystem has undergone rapid transformation:
Launch of telebirr (2021)
Market entry of Safaricom Ethiopia (2022)
Launch of M-Pesa Ethiopia (2023)
Expansion of interoperability via EthSwitch
Despite rapid mobile money growth (65M+ accounts opened), account ownership increased only +3 percentage points between 2021 and 2024.
This project investigates:
What drives financial inclusion in Ethiopia?
Why did account ownership slow despite market expansion?
What will inclusion look like in 2025–2027?