Pro-Poor Mobile Financial Services
Abduba Ibrahim Halkano, Njihia M James, Litondo Kate

Abstract
There has been significant growth and penetration of mobile financial services across the globe especially in developing countries. The poor are the target customers and beneficiaries of the mobile financial services as it provides the much needed access which formal financial service providers could not. The dominant paradigm is the conventional top-down models such as technology adoption model (TAM) and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). These theoretical models are mainly based on individual factors such as perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived credibility and perceived financial cost to study access, adoption and usage of mobile financial services. These conventional top-down models are insufficient in explaining the access, adoption and continued usage of mobile financial services by the poor. The pro-poor perspective is a bottom up approach that seeks to understand the poor specific issues of pro-poor access, adoption and continued usage of mobile financial service by the poor. The pro-poor contextual factors influence the pro-poor access, community factors influence the pro-poor adoption and cultural factors influence the propoor continued usage of mobile financial services by the poor. We establish gaps in literature in the light of the pro-poor perspective and proposes an alternative pro-poor conceptual model to better explain the pro-poor access, adoption and continued usage of mobile financial services among the poor. The proposed model could unearth the influence of pro-poor factors and their relationships with pro-poor access, adoption and usage of mobile financial services. Once validated the model could enrich the mobile financial services studies and will be of valuable use by researchers in the field of mobile financial services among poor.

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