A social network-based architecture for on-line RoSCAs in the developing world

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Source of Publication

Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, ACM DEV 2013

Publication Date

1-1-2013

Abstract

Rotating Saving and Credit Associations (RoSCA) (known as tontines in francophone Africa) are financial systems involving groups of individuals who put money together periodically and take turns to collect the kitty. They are off-line systems and are very popular in the developing world. However, they now face several challenges (e.g. geographical distance between participants, safety risks related to manual financial operations). An evolution towards on-line systems is now a necessity and this paper is a first step in that direction. It proposes an architecture which handles the participants of ROSCAs as end-users of a social network. The proposed social network accommodates poorly literate end-users who may live in areas with no Internet connection. It also integrates an on-line payment system. The rich cellular network connectivity that is commonplace in most developing countries is used to offset the poor Internet connectivity. Speech technologies (e.g. Interactive Voice Response - IVR, speech to text - STT, text to speech - TTS) are used to address the literacy issue.

ISBN

9781450325585

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

First Page

18

Disciplines

Business | Communication

Keywords

Poor Internet access, RoSCAs, Social networks, Tontine, Voice enabled social network

Scopus ID

84893364586

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

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