Mastercard’s second annual Community Pass Customer Summit in Kampala, Uganda gathered more than 90 public and private sector partners and featured thought leaders. The attendees are all dedicated to crafting solutions for digital and financial inclusion across Africa and beyond.
This year’s summit showcased over 10 technologies and financial institutions, each presenting their digital solutions designed to include underserved communities across the agriculture, health, micro-commerce, and education. It also featured interactive panel discussions focusing on the impact of digital technology in promoting service delivery and economic growth in remote areas.
The sessions at the summit explored themes such as credit access, last mile delivery infrastructures, entrepreneurship enablement, digital market systems in agriculture, resilience building for smallholder farmers, and innovative financing for sustainable commercial and social outcomes.
Leveraging Mastercard’s core capabilities, Community Pass is a shared interoperable platform that provides digital infrastructure to both public and private sector players to serve marginalized and frequently offline communities. It provides a commercially sustainable approach to scaling service delivery and increasing access to critical services including agriculture, healthcare, and micro-commerce. Community Pass is growing and has already reached nearly 5 million users globally in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and India.
Speaking during the summit, Tara Nathan, EVP and Founder of Mastercard Community Pass underscored the event’s transformative potential. “Community Pass is not just a digital platform, it’s a catalyst for change, effectively bridging the gap between underserved communities and essential services. We are excited about coming together to showcase our shared dedication to enhancing digital and financial access, with a focus on addressing the specific needs of our users.”
Kicking off the year with continued momentum, the Community Pass team announced three major collaborations:
1. The launch of the Yojana card, powered by Community Pass and in collaboration with Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions in India
2. A collaboration with Shell Foundation and Co-operative Bank of Kenya to provide below-market interest rates to smallholder farmers against lending for green technology.
3. The reveal of Equity Bank of Uganda’s financial inclusion card.
These collaborations are anticipated to drive significant changes in digital and financial inclusion for smallholder farmers and rural communities.
Through the Community Pass solution, Mastercard enables rural and marginalized communities, many of whom lack digitized data records, IDs, and/or connectivity, to digitally access a network of offline services.