In 2007 Kenya’s central bank let Safaricom launch M-Pesa on the strength of a single administrative letter — a “letter of no objection” — rather than a finished body of payment-system law. Safaricom invested roughly US$30 million over the service’s first three years, and Kenya built the most-cited mobile money market in the world.
Afghanistan’s central bank was criticised for the opposite failure: an inability to police Kabul Bank, whose 2011 collapse wiped out roughly US$900 million in fraudulent loans, froze a World Bank trust fund and left civic trust in the financial sector permanently diminished.
Most of the developing world sits between these poles. This brief asks a narrower question than whether regulation matters: which specific forms of institutional and regulatory capacity are tied to market expansion and investment, and which are tied to their absence.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
