Ethiopia’s effort to stamp out counterfeiting by introducing new currency notes is pulling people who’ve never had a bank account into the financial system. Over the past four weeks, almost 1 million previously unbanked Ethiopians have handed in their two-decade-old banknotes, according to the central bank. “On the first day of the new currency notes, you wouldn’t believe what happened here — everybody came,” said Nebyou Birhanu, who heads digital services at CBE. The central bank estimates there was 92 billion birr of unbanked cash in Ethiopia in July 2019. The central bank is preparing to allow non-financial institutions to offer mobile-money services, opening up banking to local phone companies.

Source: Ethiopian News October 19, 2020 04:18 UTC