Kenya, Turkey, Japan lead mobile money trend

By Tarmo Virki,  (Reuters) – The mobile banking business is growing in countries like Kenya, Turkey and Japan, while the combining of wallets with cell phones has been held back elsewhere by disagreements over sharing revenues.

In Kenya and Turkey, millions of people use phones to send money or access their bank accounts; in Japan, more than 50 million people, or about half of all cell phone users, already carry phones capable of serving as wallets.

The technology for paying with cell phones by flashing them near reading equipment in stores or on public transport is ready, and the initial feedback is good, said Mary Carol, head of mobile in Visa Europe.

“Trials show that consumers overwhelmingly like it,” Carol said. “The biggest problem has been the business model.”

It will also take at least until 2010 before phones equipped with such technology are widely available, and the financial industry and telecom operators need to agree on some kind of revenue and role split, industry executives say.

The meeting of the two industries will be one of the key topics next week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.

“Both — the financial sector and telecom operators — want to own the relationship with the client, this is one of the hottest issues,” said Juha Murtopuro, chief executive of Valimo Wireless, which provides cell phone identification technologies.

Murtopuro and other industry players said they expect a compromise to be eventually found, with solutions to vary from market to market.

But the ingredients are already there, given the number of consumers already owning both a mobile phone and bank account.

“Consumers are customers of multiple parties. This is something very typical also in our core industry,” said Art Kranzley, chief technology officer at Mastercard.

EMERGING MARKET OPPORTUNITY

For many consumers in emerging markets, their first banking transactions will likely be done through cell phones.

“All the pieces are coming into place for mobile banking to transform the way some 1.5 billion people get banking services in emerging markets,” said Elizabeth Littlefield, head of CGAP, a policy and research center seeking to improve financial access for the world’s poor.

In Kenya, 5 million people have signed up in less than two years to use Safaricom’s M-Pesa service, which enables people to send money to each other.

CGAP said M-Pesa is 45 percent cheaper than other transfer services, with 83 percent of users seeing a “large negative impact” on their lives if they did not have the service.

In Turkey, some 2 million transactions — most of them cash withdrawals from ATMs — were made last year using Turkcell’s mobile service.

New Atlas Maps a Blueprint for Kenya’s Green Development

Kenya’s chances of realizing its 2030 vision will depend increasingly on the way the country manages its natural or nature-based assets, a new satellite-based atlas concludes.

Many of these economic assets are coming under rising pressure: from shrinking tea-growing areas to disappearing lakes, increasing loss of tree cover in water catchments and proliferating mosquito breeding grounds, environmental degradation is taking its toll on Kenya’s present and future development opportunities.

Thus improved and more creative management is urgently needed to translate the aspiration, to the realizing of Vision 2030.

These are among the key conclusions of the new 168-page Atlas produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the request of the Government of Kenya.

Kenya: Atlas of Our Changing Environment was launched today by Kenyan Environment Minister John Michuki and UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

It is the first-ever publication of its kind to document environmental change in an individual country, through the use of dozens of satellite images spanning the last three decades.

The request for the Atlas, funded by Norway and supported by the United States Geological Survey, follows the launch last June in Johannesburg of Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment at a meeting of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment.

Mr Steiner said: “The Kenya Atlas shows both the diversity and the fragility of the country’s natural assets which are at the heart of the nation’s socio-economic development.  It highlights some success stories of environmental management around the country, but it also puts the spotlight on major environmental challenges including deforestation, soil erosion and coastal degradation.”

“The Atlas makes a strong case that investments in green infrastructure within a Green Economy can bring it closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The Atlas is for the government and for all Kenyans who want to see transformational change and a path out of poverty to prosperity by sustainably realizing this country’s true development potential,” he added.

Some of the key findings of the Kenya Atlas include:

• The nation has increased the proportion of land area protected for biological diversity from 12.1 percent in 1990 to 12.7 percent (about 75 238 km2) in 2007.

• The land available per person in Kenya has dropped from 7.2 hectares per person in 1960 to just 1.7 ha per person in 2005 due to the rapid population growth of the last few decades. There are now 38 million inhabitants in Kenya, up from just eight million in 1960. The population is expected to keep rising, and land available per person is projected to drop to 0.3 ha per person by 2050.

• Five water towers – Mau Forest Complex, Aberdares Range, Mt. Elgon, Cherangani Hills and Kakamega Forest – are critical  as water catchments, vital for tourism, and hence towards achieving Kenya’s vision 2030

• The rivers flowing from the Mau Complex are the lifeline for major tourism destinations including the Maasai Mara Game Reserve and Lake Nakuru National Park. In 2007, revenues from entry fees alone amounted to Ksh. 650 million (US$ 8.2 million at today’s exchange rate) and Ksh. 513 million (US$ 6.3 million at today’s exchange rate) for the Maasai Mara and Lake Nakuru respectively.

• A temperature rise of just 2 degrees Celsius would make large areas of Kenya unsuitable for growing tea, which accounts for 22 percent of the country’s total export earnings. Some 400,000 smallholder farmers grow 60 percent of Kenyan tea.

• Rapid population growth coupled with conversion of land cover within Lake Olbollosat’s catchment is posing a huge threat to the lake which has periodically dried up and then come back to life in the past. There is concern that the increasing number of pressures may mean that if it dries up again, it could be the end of Lake Olbollosat.

• The value of soil lost due to erosion in Kenya each year is three to four times as high as the annual income from tourism. In 2007, earnings from tourism totaled 65.4 billion Kenyan Shillings (or more than US$ 824 million at today’s exchange rate).

• Forest loss increases key health risks such as malaria. Research in the western district of Kisii shows that old natural habitats with a greater diversity of mosquito predators – such as dragonflies and beetles – have a lower density of mosquitoes. Intact forests also have less breeding sites for mosquitoes. Thus conserving forests has multiple economic benefits from soil stabilization, improved water supplies, more reliable hydro-power and tourism to health ones including reducing the risk of malaria epidemics.

• The Cherangani Hills have seen less forest loss than the other “water tower” forests in recent years and significant areas of indigenous forest remain. Monitoring and careful management are needed to preserve these valuable assets.

From Maasai Mara to Lake Turkana – Kenyan ecosystems under pressure

The Atlas’s before-and-after satellite images in this Atlas vividly document the environmental change in 30 locations across Kenya since 1973 including:

• The Mau Forest Complex, a key water catchment is being deforested at an alarming rate due to charcoal production, logging, encroachment and settlements. One quarter of the Mau forest – some 100,000 hectares – has been destroyed since 2000.

• Large scale, uncontrolled, irregular, or illegal human activities like charcoal production, logging, settlements, and crop cultivation, among others, caused devastation within the Aberdares range. The construction of a fence around the Aberdare Range has reduced/stopped uncontrolled, irregular, or illegal human activities within the forest, as well as human wildlife conflicts

• The Atlas underlines the kinds of economic and environmental choices facing policy-makers. For example it notes that the vast ecotourism potential of the Aberdare National Park remains largely untapped, with just 50,000 visitors per year on average.

• Large mechanized wheat farms in the area surrounding the Maasai Mara have expanded by 1,000 percent between 1975 and 1995, most of them on the Loita Plains, significantly reducing the available natural grasslands in this important habitat for wildebeest—a key economic species in terms of tourism.

• Between 1973 and 2006, almost half of the natural vegetation cover around Lake Nakuru, another big tourism attraction not least for its pink flamingoes, was lost. The satellite pictures show a clear degradation of forest cover west of the lake, partly due to the excision of 350 square kilometers of forest in 2001.

• Lakes across the country are under intensified pressure, with Lake Naivasha struggling to cope with the expansion of settlements and flower farms in the towns of Naivasha and Karagita; Lake Turkana losing water through a combination of decreased rainfall, increased upstream diversion and increased evaporation due to higher temperatures.

• Prosopis – a terrestrial shrub- has blocked pathways, altered river courses, taken over farmlands, and suppressed other fodder species in the areas around Lake Baringo since the 1980s.

• Some estimates suggest that about half of the mangroves on Kenya’s coast have been lost over the past 50 years due to the overexploitation of wood products and conversion to salt-panning, agriculture and other uses.

Towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals and Vision 2030

According to the data presented in the Atlas, Kenya has made some important strides towards achieving some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – with notable headway in the fight against poverty, the provision of universal education and the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

Yet challenges remain for Kenya on the road to achieving environmental sustainability, notably limited government capacity for environmental management and insufficient institutional and legal frameworks for enforcement and coordination.

The Atlas notes that deforestation, land degradation and water pollution are some of the challenges Kenya needs to address to achieve MDG7, ‘Ensure Environmental Sustainability’.

One key finding of the Atlas is that achieving environmental sustainability is fundamental to achieving all the MDGs. Environmental resources and conditions have a significant impact on many aspects of poverty and development.

“One of the most powerful ways to help achieve the first MDG – eradicate extreme poverty and hunger – is to ensure that environmental quality and quantity is maintained in the long term,” the authors say.

For instance, poor people often depend on natural resources and ecosystems for income; time spent collecting water and fuelwood by children can reduce the time at school; and environment-related diseases such as diarrhoea, acute respiratory infection, leukemia and childhood cancer are primary causes of child mortality.

“Vision 2030, with its ambitious development blueprint, is a key opportunity for the Kenyan Government to address environmental challenges as a key element underpinning the country’s sustainability and development,” concludes the Atlas.

Notes to Editors

Kenya: Atlas of Our Changing Environment features numerous satellite images taken around Kenya, along with 65 maps, 26 graphs and 229 ground photographs illustrating the environmental issues faced by the country.

The Atlas provides compelling visual evidence of the changes taking place in 30 locations across the country’s critical ecosystems due to pressures from human activities.

The before-and-after display of satellite images spanning three decades highlights forest loss, wetland drainage, shrinking lakes and coastal degradation, as well as examples of good management and successful environmental strategies.

The Atlas analyzes the linkages between the country’s major socio-economic activities and its key natural resources – illustrating, for example, the link between agricultural productivity and forests, which regulate the micro-climates that make farming possible.

The Kenya Atlas follows on from UNEP’s Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment, published in June 2008, which gave an overview of environmental change across the continent.

All the materials in the Atlas are non-copyrighted and available for free use.

Individual satellite images, maps, graphs and photographs, can be downloaded from http://na.unep.net/

or http://www.unep.org/dewa/Africa/KenyaAtlas

Parliament rejects post election tribunal

Kenya parliament has returned the post election Tribunal Bill which seeks to establish a special court in the country to try perpetrators of the 2007 post election violence. The vote came after weeks of debate and lobbying by those supporting the Bill on one hand and those against it on the other.

A total of 93 members of parliament voted against the bill out of the 195 MPs in Parliament. The Bill received only 101 votes, well below the required number of 145 members to amend the constitution. In total there are 222 MPs.

The Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence chaired by Judge Philip Waki had given the government up to 1 March to have the special tribunal up and running.

However MPs have cast aside the bill saying they did not have faith in Kenya’s justice system and that those involved in the violence should be tried at The Hague. The rejection of the bill means that the commission can now hand over the list of alleged perpetrators to an international court for investigation and trial.

Last Thursday, a vote on the amendments was re-scheduled due to a lack of quorum in parliament. According to Kenya’s parliament procedures, a vote cannot be held on a constitutional Bill unless at least 145 MPs are present. On Tuesday, the Bill was removed from the list of issues to be debated to give the government time to marshal support.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga who fought for the bill in parliament including intensive lobbying, have expressed disappointed by the MPs vote.

“This is a setback in the war against impunity and injustice, the government will take stock and move forward,” a clearly disappointed Mr Odinga told reporters.

Post election clashes in Kenya broke out after Mr Odinga said the results of the December 2007 election had been rigged in favour of the president. After weeks of talks led by Mr Annan, in February 2008 the rivals agreed to share power to bring an end to the violence.

Some 1,333 were killed and more than 600,000 displaced after the presidential election. Mobs looted and torched businesses in many parts of the country, also blocking main roads with burnt trucks, a move which hit hard on the country’s economy.

Why We Love Who We Love

Have you ever known a married couple that just didn’t seem as though they should fit together — yet they are both happy in the marriage, and you can’t figure out why?

I know of one couple: He is a burly ex-athlete who, in addition to being a successful salesman, coaches Little League, is active in his Rotary Club and plays golf every Saturday with friends. Meanwhile, his wife is petite, quiet and a complete homebody. She doesn’t even like to go out to dinner.

What mysterious force drives us into the arms of one person, while pushing us away from another who might appear equally desirable to any unbiased observer?

Of the many factors influencing our idea of the perfect mate, one of the most telling, according to John Money, professor emeritus of medical psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, is what he calls our “love map” — a group of messages encoded in our brains that describes our likes and dislikes. It shows our preferences in hair and eye color, in voice, smell, body build. It also records the kind of personality that appeals to us, whether it’s the warm and friendly type or the strong, silent type.

In short, we fall for and pursue those people who most clearly fit our love map. And this love map is largely determined in childhood. By age eight, the pattern for our ideal mate has already begun to float around in our brains.

When I lecture, I often ask couples in the audience what drew them to their dates or mates. Answers range from “She’s strong and independent” and “I go for redheads” to “I love his sense of humor” and “That crooked smile, that’s what did it.”

I believe what they say. But I also know that if I were to ask those same men and women to describe their mothers, there would be many similarities between their ideal mates and their moms. Yes, our mothers — the first real love of our lives — write a significant portion of our love map.

When we’re little, our mother is the center of our attention, and we are the center of hers. So our mother’s characteristics leave an indelible impression, and we are forever after attracted to people with her facial features, body type, personality, even sense of humor. If our mother was warm and giving, as adults we tend to be attracted to people who are warm and giving. If our mother was strong and even-tempered, we are going to be attracted to a fair-minded strength in our mates.

The mother has an additional influence on her sons: she not only gives them clues to what they will find attractive in a mate, but also affects how they feel about women in general. So if she is warm and nice, her sons are going to think that’s the way women are. They will likely grow up warm and responsive lovers and also be cooperative around the house.

Conversely, a mother who has a depressive personality, and is sometimes friendly but then suddenly turns cold and rejecting, may raise a man who becomes a “dance-away lover.” Because he’s been so scared about love from his mother, he is afraid of commitment and may pull away from a girlfriend for this reason.

While the mother determines in large part what qualities attract us in a mate, it’s the father — the first male in our lives — who influences how we relate to the opposite sex. Fathers have an enormous effect on their children’s personalities and chances of marital happiness.

Just as mothers influence their son’s general feelings toward women, fathers influence their daughter’s general feelings about men. If a father lavishes praise on his daughter and demonstrates that she is a worthwhile person, she’ll feel very good about herself in relation to men. But if the father is cold, critical or absent, the daughter will tend to feel she’s not very lovable or attractive.

In addition, most of us grow up with people of similar social circumstances. We hang around with people in the same town; our friends have about the same educational backgrounds and career goals. We tend to be most comfortable with these people, and therefore we tend to link up with others whose families are often much like our own.

Complementary Needs

What about opposites? Are they really attracted to each other? Yes and no. In many ways we want a mirror image of ourselves. Physically attractive people, for example, are usually drawn to a partner who’s equally attractive.

Robert Winch, a longtime sociology professor at Northwestern University, stated in his research that our choice of a marriage partner involves a number of social similarities. But he also maintained that we look for someone with complementary needs. A talker is attracted to someone who likes to listen, or an aggressive personality may seek out a more passive partner.

It’s rather like the old, but perceptive, saying on the subject of marriage that advises future partners to make sure that the holes in one’s head fit the bumps in the other’s. Or, as Winch observed, it’s the balancing out of sociological likenesses and psychological differences that seems to point the way for the most solid lifelong romance.

However, there are instances where people of different social backgrounds end up getting married and being extremely happy. I know of one man, a factory worker from a traditional Irish family in Chicago, who fell in love with an African American Baptist. When they got married, their friends and relatives predicted a quick failure. But 25 years later, the marriage is still strong.

It turns out that the woman was like her mother-in-law — a loving and caring person, the type who rolls up her sleeves and volunteers to work at church or help out people in need. This is the quality that her husband fell for, and it made color and religion and any other social factors irrelevant to him.

Or as George Burns, who was Jewish and married the Irish Catholic Gracie Allen, used to say: his marriage was his favorite gig, even though it was Gracie who got all the laughs. The two of them did share certain social similarities — both grew up in the city, in large but poor families. Yet what really drew them together was evident from the first time they went onstage together. They complemented each other perfectly: he was the straight man, and she delivered the punch lines.

There are certainly such “odd couples” who could scarcely be happier. We all know some drop-dead beautiful person married to an unusually plain wallflower. This is a trade-off some call the equity theory.

When men and women possess a particular asset, such as high intelligence, unusual beauty, a personality that makes others swoon, or a hefty bankroll that has the same effect, some decide to trade their assets for someone else’s strong points. The raging beauty may trade her luster for the power and security that come with big bucks. The not-so-talented fellow from a good family may swap his pedigree for a poor but brilliantly talented mate.

Indeed, almost any combination can survive and thrive. Once, some neighbors of mine stopped by for a friendly social engagement. During the evening Robert, a man in his 50s, suddenly blurted out, “What would you say if your daughter planned to marry someone who has a ponytail and insisted on doing the cooking?”

“Unless your daughter loves cooking,” I responded, “I’d say she was darn lucky.”

“Exactly,” his wife agreed. “It’s really your problem, Robert — that old macho thing rearing its head again. The point is, they’re in love.”

I tried to reassure Robert, pointing out that the young man their daughter had picked out seemed to be a relaxed, nonjudgmental sort of person — a trait he shared with her own mother.

Is there such a thing as love at first sight? Why not? When people become love-struck, what happens in that instant is the couple probably discover a unique something they have in common. It could be something as mundane as they both were reading the same book or were born in the same town. At the same time they recognize some trait in the other that complements their own personality.

I happen to be one of those who were struck by the magic wand. On that fateful weekend, while I was a sophomore at Cornell University, I had a terrible cold and hesitated to join my family on vacation in the Catskill Mountains. Finally I decided anything would be better than sitting alone in my dormitory room.

That night as I was preparing to go to dinner, my sister rushed up the stairs and said, “When you walk into that dining room, you’re going to meet the man you’ll marry.”

I think I said something like “Buzz off!” But my sister couldn’t have been more right. I knew it from the moment I saw him, and the memory still gives me goose flesh. He was a premed student, also at Cornell, who incidentally also had a bad cold. I fell in love with Milton the instant I met him.

Milt and I were married for 39 years, until his death in 1989. And all that time we experienced a love that Erich Fromm called a “feeling of fusion, of oneness,” even while we both continued to change, grow and fulfill our lives.

Neighbours watch Kenya’s politics with horror

More than 100 dead from tanker explosion