The DataHack4FI competition seeks to advance financial inclusion through data innovation.

It does this by encouraging and upskilling young finance, tech and data enthusiasts in Africa to use data and data analytics to collectively solve business challenges and to make appropriate financial services more affordable and readily accessible to unserved and underserved communities. 

We’ve departed from Season 1’s more traditional hackathon to working with fintechs or tech start-ups that either have a product in the market or will launch one soon. This approach has demonstrated that many start-ups are collecting data but underestimate the value of that data and the potential it has for unlocking additional benefits for their customers. Therefore, they fail to analyse it. Season 2’s has been focused on creating opportunities and upskilling youth and women in data science. In Season 2, tech companies were paired with data enthusiasts to explore the potential of their data for financial inclusion. In turn, the data enthusiasts were mentored by data science experts. This enabled us to bolster existing and new networks that allow for the empowerment of youth and women to design scalable, financial inclusion solutions. 

By running the innovation competition in six African countries, we’ve been able to identify and mobilise young finance, tech and data enthusiasts to collaborate in using data to develop creative solutions to the problems people face in accessing and benefiting from financial services. 

Explore the DataHack4FI participants and local solutions in the report below.  

insight2impact (i2ifacility) was funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with Mastercard Foundation. The programme was established and driven by Cenfri and Finmark Trust.