The second edition of the WAEMU Financial Inclusion Week was opened yesterday, Monday 18
November. An opportunity for the governor of the Bceao Tiémoko Meyliet Koné, to salute the progress
obtained in the Union in terms of access to financial services.
The WAEMU zone has seen significant progress in terms of access to financial services with a
increase of 10 percentage points between 2016 and 2018, according to the governor of the Bceao. Tiémoko
Meyliet Koné spoke at the opening of the second edition of Financial Inclusion Week
in WAEMU.
According to Koné, during the previous edition of Financial Inclusion Week, we <> focused on the role of financial inclusion as a lever for economic and social development, in
especially for emerging countries. In this regard, the Committee notes with satisfaction that the recommendations
resulting from this edition have enabled some EU countries to undertake far contribute to the creation of an ecosystem conducive to financial inclusion and which are to be welcomed.
"I would like to mention, by way of illustration, the openness, to all financial service providers, in some
country, technology that allows data exchange in telecommunications networks,
commonly referred to as the "USSD channel". The benefits of such an evolution are important for the
development of financial services accessible to the population," said the head of the Bceao.
"Progress is also noted in the development of national financial inclusion strategies and
the establishment of working groups on financial education. I also see the progress
registered in terms of access to financial services. The financial inclusion rate was 57.1% at
at the end of 2018, compared to 47.0% in 2016, an increase of more than 10 percentage points.
These notable advances are mainly driven by the contribution of financial services via the
mobile telephony whose usage rate stands at 34.0% in 2018," he revealed. He claims that this intake of
electronic money has resulted in the WAEMU in an increase in the number of money accounts
Open electronics, which stood at more than 62.9 million in 2018 compared to 18.2 million in 2014. The number
of transactions, meanwhile, increased from 0.3 billion in 2014 to 1.9 billion in 2018, or 3,760 billion
cfa francs to 23.534 billion CFA francs
According to the head of the Bceao, the perceptible evolutions of the financial ecosystem of our Union indicate
whereas progress on financial inclusion will be driven in particular by digital payments, government policies on digitalization and the development of second
financial services generation via mobile phone.
These projections are corroborated by the results of the Central Bank< recent work for the > construction of a synthetic index of financial inclusion for WAEMU countries. Index that reveals
moreover, the prospects for improving financial inclusion lie in the exploitation of
opportunities offered by new technologies. He believes that digital transformation is today a hot topic, both for developed economies and for emerging countries and
in development.