Suzana Moreira : moWoza

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Hrishi and Ben chatted with Suzana Moreira, founder of moWoza, a mobile service for migrant workers in South Africa to send money and goods back to their families.

Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable, as they are often unregistered and so cannot use traditional banking services.  moWoza serves as an agent for these workers to send remittances back home, in the form of food and even electronics.

Remittances are clearly vital to these migrant workers and their families, but the pipelines between A and B is leaky at best, with lots of places where goods can be lost or stolen.  So rather than reinvent the wheel, moWoza tackles the problem with 21st century tactics, bringing together the ubiquity of the mobile phone and the existing cross-border commerce.

One of the other interesting points about this enterprise is that it is capturing data about a market about which very little is known.  If moWoza takes of there is a lot of potential for addressing the needs of this vulnerable group.

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