A Stakeholder's Analysis of the Effect of Mobile Money in Developing Countries: The Case of Orange Money in Mali

Introduction And Background

Mali is a landlocked developing country in West Africa. It has a surface area of 1,241,000 km² (Traore, Gakou, Traore, & Tolno, 2012), with a population of 19,677,354 (Worldometers, 2019). The adults' literacy rate is approximately 33.1% (INSTAT, 2015). Information and Communication Technology (ICT), particularly the use mobile phones is growing in Sub-Saharan African countries with approximately 420 (representing 43%) million unique mobile subscribers (Olsen, 2017). This growth is more important in some countries than others. In West Africa for instance, Mali has the highest mobile phone penetration rate with 91% as of January 2019, which represents 17.71 Million users (HootSuite, 2019). Additionally, Internet usage is growingt in Mali with a penetration rate of 64 per cent (HootSuite, 2019). The growing usage of mobile phones in sub Saharan and Mali in particular provides an opportunity to deliver services such as mobile money to the population in Sub-Saharan countries, including Mali.

Mobile money is a tool that allows individuals to make financial transactions using cellular networks and technology (William Jack & Suri, 2011). Mobile money is also defined as a means towards a cashless economy, in which all transactions are conducted through electronic channels and/or means such as the use of mobile phones or credit/debit cards (Garg & Panchal, 2016). This does not mean that there is a total absence of cash-based transactions but rather it is an optional setting in which electronic media (mobile phones) are used to buy and pay for goods and services (Omotunde, Sunday & John-Dewole, 2013).

The use of mobile phones in Mali can be trace to the 90s (Kante, Oboko, & Chepken, 2019), while mobile money services erupted more than a decade later. The first mobile money service in the country was Orange Money, launched in 2010 by the Orange network provider. Orange Money became popular in the country with about 3.5 million users in 2016 (Orange, 2017). This represents a growth of about 0.7 million users per year. The provision of mobile money services (Orange Money) presents an opportunity for the unbanked population, which represents about 83.5% in Mali (Kodjo, 2018). Mobile money service could facilitate the flow of money amongst this vast majority of the population in the country who do not own a bank account. Furthermore, a cashless economy through the mobile money service can be a means to stop black money and to reduce money laundry (Garg & Panchal, 2016). Therefore, there is a huge opportunity for this service (mobile money) in Sub-Saharan African countries in general and in Mali in particular.

However, there are also challenges around the cashless economy especially mobile money with regard to security, laws, and policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. These challenges restrain the adoption of mobile money service in Africa. For instance, Kante (2017) argues that business depends on customers’ data protection as the consequences of the security breach are very acute on both personal and corporate level. Similarly, Kanobe, Alexander, & Bwalya (2017) argue that the rapid growth in the use of mobile money systems needs to be sustained with customers’ confidence and safety of their information in Uganda. Moreover, many factors such as lack of trust, sensitisation, training, exposure, and fear of unreliable internet connectivity services (Malinga & Maiga, 2019); cultural norm and tradition (Imran, Quimno, & Hussain, 2016); cost of the service, fraud, trialability (Wamuyu, 2014) in Kenya; Risks, habit, social influence, lack of clear policy (Killian & Kabanda, 2017) in South Africa; affordability (Uduji, Okolo-Obasi, & Asongu, 2019) in Nigeria have been reported as challenges to the adoption of mobile money services. Therefore there is a need for good information security management practices and standards to ensure patients data protection when using mobile money services. These studies highlighted some challenges pertaining to the adoption of mobile money in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria. What remains unclear is whether these challenges are the same in Mali. Furthermore, the drivers of the adoption of mobile money services in Mali are still unknown.

Furthermore, there is a paucity of research that investigated challenges and drivers of the mobile money services adoption using the Stakeholder Theory. Therefore, the primary aim of this paper is to explore the drivers and challenges of the mobile money service adoption for each stakeholdee using the case of Orange Money. This study adopted the Stakeholder Theory as the guiding theoretical framework. Secondly, it aims to assess the extent to which these drivers and challenges affect these stakeholders.