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Active mobile money accounts

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Technological Change

What you should know about this indicator

  • Mobile money accounts are financial accounts managed via mobile devices. They offer services like deposits, transfers, and payments, mainly in regions with limited banking access.
  • In this data, accounts are considered active when they have been used to perform at least one mobile money payment during the last 90 days of each year.
  • North America is not shown because mobile money accounts are not used across this region.

The number of customer accounts that have been used to perform at least one P2P payment, bill payment, bulk payment, cash in to account, cash out from account, merchant payments, international remittances or airtime top up from account during at least 90 days prior to end of the indicated months. Balance inquiries, PIN resets, and other transactions that do not involve the movement of value DO NOT qualify a customer account as active.

Active mobile money accounts
Mobile money accounts used to perform at least one mobile money payment during the last 90 days of each year.
Source
GSM Association (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 30, 2024
Next expected update
May 2025
Date range
2010–2023
Unit
active accounts

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Global Mobile Money Dataset is a set of global metrics on mobile money accounts, collected by the GSM Association (GSMA). It employs a wide range of data sources that the Mobile Money program has been collecting and analyzing since 2009.

Retrieved on
May 30, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.gsma.com/mobilemoneymetrics/#global
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Global Mobile Money Dataset, GSM Association

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All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Active mobile money accounts”, part of the following publication: Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu (2023) - “Technological Change”. Data adapted from GSM Association. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/active-mobile-money-accounts [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

GSM Association (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

GSM Association (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Active mobile money accounts” [dataset]. GSM Association, “Global Mobile Money Dataset” [original data]. Retrieved November 21, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/active-mobile-money-accounts