TRADITION TO INNOVATION

Ahmed Wadi, Founder and CEO of Money Fellows, Egypt’s biggest ROSCA platform, has been addressing the cash-centric country’s financial challenges by digitizing traditional money circles. Now, he has even bigger plans.

- SAMAR KHOURI

In Egypt, cash is king. Around 69% of the population is still without a bank account, according to a 2023 report by FinTech Egypt, an initiative by the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE). However, Africa's largest economy, which brought in $476.7 billion in GDP at purchaser's prices in 2022, has been making strides toward financial inclusion.

According to the CBE, the country's financial inclusion rate climbed to 70.7% in December 2023, compared to 64.8% the year before, and it grew 174% overall from 2016 to 2023. Financial inclusion among the 36.6 million Egyptians aged 16 to 35 grew 48.5% from 2020 to reach 51.5% last year, driven by various bank-driven initiatives and projects in line with Egypt's Vision 2030 strategy.

For those traditionally underserved by banks, however, there are other options. Ahmed Wadi, Founder and CEO of Money Fellows has been supporting financial inclusion by spearheading the digitization of traditional money circles, or Gam'eya in Egyptian Arabic. Gam'eya is an informal lending circle commonly practiced in Egypt. Also known as a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA), it's where a small community of people contributes a fixed amount of money to a person as a loan that is then gradually paid back every month. Having been founded in 2016, Money Fellows has grown to become Egypt's biggest ROSCA platform.