1998
Under an assignment of the World Bank, missions to 6 Sub-Saharan African countries were executed, with the purpose of making a Preliminary Assessment of Postal Financial Services in Africa (1998).
The findings and conclusions served a dual objective:
- to provide insight into the present state of affairs, to serve as a basis on which to elaborate a detailed Terms of Reference for the envisaged World Bank ‘African Postal Reform’ project, and
- to provide realistic and concrete examples of room for improvement of PFS, to be used at a subsequent conference, held in November 1998, on Postal Banking in Africa (co-organised by Postbank International Consultancy and Nepostel; and funded by the World Bank and the Netherlands Government).
The main issues and constraints observed during the missions were related to the (inadequate) co-operation between postal organisations and postal/ retail banks. Therefore, the conference focused on defining the conditions and ‘recipes’ necessary to achieve a genuinely synergetic and mutually beneficial relationship between the postal organisations and the (postal) banking entities, in the pursuit of their objectives and of the fulfilment of their social mandate to serve all segments of the population.
