Mapping Proximity: Bringing Products and Services Close Enough to the Poor to be Meaningfully Usable and Still Keep them Sustainable for WSBI Partner Banks

This paper defines a methodology to map optimal proximity of the agency outlets for WSBI partner banks. The intention behind the mapping is to understand how people cluster in their day-to-day lives and help financial institutions plan where to put new outlets.The paper uses official data from the national census bureaus and supply-side data for financial providers for Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and lists the challenges in using official data properly. It also uses public domain data available for Africa to shortlist significant settlements, determine the catchment population, and analyze the financial service provision by settlement sizes. The paper generalizes its approach for performing a spatial proximity analysis as below:

• Assemble data on demographics which are readily available from national statistics bureaus;
• Assemble data on poverty which generally can be obtained from national household surveys;
• Obtain data on settlements and financial institutions from government sources and regulators respectively;
• Generate basic maps to show where people are, and where financial institution outlets are;
• Use analytical processes to generate a list of all settlements above a certain size that do not have financial institution outlets, and can therefore be part of organizations expansion plan.