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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
And Senegal, 76 inhabitants/km2 (The World Bank 2020e).As for increasing the rate of bank access and access to financial services, this is a motive for Senegal and Tunisia, along with the Bahamas, Saint Martin and Curaçao.Tunisia has already started the process of digitizing its national currency using blockchain technology, with the electronic dinar or e-dinar. The establishment of the e-dinar as the official virtual currency does not mean the elimination of the Tunisian dinar, the physical currency. The e-dinar will be backed by the value of the physical currency. According to Chehade (2015), “Currently, there is a great demand for financial services in Tunisia from both individuals (from 2.5 to 3.5 million) and companies (from 245,000 to 425,000 small and very small companies)”; in other words, approximately 81% of Tunisians are interested in banking services, especially microcredit.Africa seems a priori a propitious place to establish this new blockchain-based monetary technology, virtual currency. Hence, we can ask ourselves, what is driving these African countries to make this decision? The answer in the case of Senegal and many others basically derives from geographic dispersion. Many inhabitants of the African continent live in remote areas and do not have access to traditional banking services (see Figure 1), therefore have difficulty managing cash. The key, therefore, is geographic dispersion.Beyond the case of Senegal, in other African countries with geographic dispersion and a low bank penetration rate (which is analyzed in the following section), mobile payments have a large presence. This can be seen in Figure 2.As we can see in Figure 2, these African countries have developed their own virtual currency (ME) and decentralized financial system (SFD).To these cases, we can add Kenya. In 2015, a private company launched M-Pesa as a form of mobile payment. However, we comment on it, but we do not delve into it as it is not a virtual currency backed by a central bank.As we can see in Figure 3, if we take population density as a measure, we can easily see how the population density on the African continent is very low compared to the Euro area and Japan. The low population density and greater dispersion make it difficult to access traditional banking services carried out in an office. The latter is analyzed in the following section. 4.2. Increased Bank Penetration Rate and Access to Financial ServicesFinancial inclusion has several positive effects in an economy. First, it improves the effectiveness of financial intermediaries by increasing the number of actors in the financial system, along with the volume and value of transactions. At the macroeconomic level, a developed financial system, measured by its level of financial intermediation, has a positive correlation with growth, employment and poverty and, therefore, reduced inequality, according to Cull et al. (2014). The reason that prompted Tunisia to establish its virtual currency backed by the central bank via e-dinar was financial inclusion. Along with this would be the reason already seen in the African case: geographic dispersion. The inhabitants of the African continent live
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