AI Innovation Takes Centre Stage at Kifiya and Mastercard Foundation’s Third Knowledge Series

In Addis Ababa’s buzzing Shola Market, a fruit seller scrolls through her phone between customers. She’s not checking social media; she’s watching her digital loan balance tick upward after each repayment, a process once unimaginable for market vendors without a credit history. 

This is the promise of AI-driven lending, but it’s a promise that has yet to be fulfilled for much of Ethiopia’s population. Only 49% of Ethiopians have a financial account, with millions, especially rural communities, still excluded from any form of formal or digital financial services. For Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), the gap is even wider: just 1.9% of small enterprises and 6% of micro-enterprises can access loans. These numbers reflect not just a financing shortfall, but missed opportunities for job creation, entrepreneurship, and sustained economic growth.

This is the gap Kifiya Financial Technology has been pioneering solutions to bridge. Leveraging artificial intelligence, its credit scoring models, built on alternative data and predictive analytics, have enabled banks to disburse over 35 billion ETB in collateral-free loans to 467,700+ MSMEs. Within this total, the Sustainable Access to Finance to Enable Entrepreneurship (SAFEE) program, co-created with the Mastercard Foundation, has extended credit to 358,977 MSMEs and 355,027 women entrepreneurs, sustaining more than 1 million jobs and unlocking 16 billion ETB in loans. For hundreds of thousands of businesses, AI is no longer an abstract concept; it is the difference between stagnation and growth.

However, these strides still fall short of meeting the needs of a country where more than half of the adult population is unbanked. Closing this gap will require an ecosystem approach, built on sustained research, strong partnerships, and sector-wide collaboration, to create financial innovations that reach millions of excluded people in Ethiopia and across Africa. 

In this context, Kifiya,  in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and as part of the SAFEE program, is convening the Third Knowledge Series this Thursday at the Hyatt Regency in Addis Ababa. The flagship event will bring together 300–350 senior decision-makers from government, banking, fintech, development partners, and industry associations to explore how AI can unlock entirely new markets and models for MSMEs and smallholder farmers, devising practical pathways toward inclusive growth.

Building on the previous Knowledge Series’ focus on “Digital lending for inclusive growth”, the upcoming third edition expands the conversation. Under the theme “Leveraging AI Innovations to Unlock New Markets and New Models for the Financial Industry with a focus on MSMEs and Agri-financing,” the conference invites Ethiopia’s financial sector to think beyond automation and toward designing financial products that reach those left behind. 

Headlined by Efosa Ojomo, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox, the event will explore how to turn “non-consumption”, when people want a product or service but can’t get it because it’s too expensive, too far, or too complex, into thriving new markets. In inclusive finance, these new markets emerge the moment people who were previously locked out of the financial system gain access to financial services for the first time, opening the door for millions of new participants in the economy. At the same time, financing the innovators who design products and services for these underserved communities creates entirely new industries and growth opportunities. This dual expansion, empowering the newly banked while funding the market-makers, is how inclusive finance becomes a powerful engine for entrepreneurship, job creation, and broad-based prosperity. 

Guided by this thinking, leaders of Ethiopia’s financial sector will gather to shape strategies for how AI can accelerate market-led growth in Ethiopia and beyond. With national investments in digital ID, interoperable payments, and cloud infrastructure, the country is laying the foundation for a more connected economy. These foundations are enabling AI to move from concept to reality, already reshaping how finance operates, who it reaches, and the markets it can create.

The Third Knowledge Series is a call to seize this moment, to harness AI not just for efficiency, but as a bridge between innovation and inclusion, unlocking new markets, empowering MSMEs and smallholder farmers, and redefining Ethiopia’s financial future.