Bloomberg: Huawei Agrees to Deal to Help African Expats Send Money Home

The Chinese company Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecom equipment, has partnered “with British money-transfer operator WorldRemit Ltd” in order to “tap into growing demand for money transfers from Africans living abroad using mobile-payments services,” reports Loni Prinsloo for Bloomberg. At approximately $36 billion, remittances are a key component of the sub-Saharan African economy, equivalent to the entire GDP of countries like Gabon or Botswana. The partnership appears mutually beneficial: Digital payments are anticipated to be particularly “popular in places where banks are scarce or unreliable,” and Huawei can use banking to increase consumer satisfaction in a time of decreasing profit margins. Many economists assert that in embracing not only mobile phones, but also a variety of new technologies such as drones and portable solar panels, African nations have been “leapfrogging” past the technology of the 20th century directly into the 21st. —YaleGlobal