I read many articles out there on how mobile finance startups are abusing people’s data and people need to be careful of the startups that are offering mobile finance products. I think this attitude is generally bad for the people it seeks to protect. It’s a lot of developed market thinking in emerging market realities. In the United States, the internet is almost available to everyone, and people created profiles on the internet in detail. We’re seeing a backlash against that in the form of people demanding greater transparency from their governments and the big companies that own most of the data. In Africa, the internet hasn’t really extended to everyone, and even when it does, it will most likely be in a form dominated by the big companies American people are currently demanding transparency from. So people’s digital profiles don’t really exist.
MNOs own most of the data in on people in Africa, but they don’t really do much with it. Startups that are offering mobile finance products require data from MNOs to build profiles of people and create accurate credit scores. Without those scores, people can’t get access to money. Their choices shrink. So when I see Western donors saying that startups are not respecting people’s data privacy, what they are really saying is they don’t want innovation, and they want the MNOs to lock up the vault and throw away the key. That’s a defeatist attitude, and it’s harmful to the very people they are claiming to look out for. Instead of putting out blanket statements like that, they should work with the startups to develop better data protections for people, and push the MNOs to share more data, so that more innovation can happen.