The Mobile Money for the Unbanked Programme has awarded grants to AKTEL in Bangladesh, Dialog Telekom PLC in Sri Lanka, Grameenphone Ltd in Bangladesh, MTN Cameroon, MTN Uganda and Vodacom Tanzania. This is in addition to the grants that were already announced in October, to SMART, AXIS, Roshan and Oi. The funding from MMU will serve to accelerate these deployments, and the learnings will be shared by the Programme with the wider industry in order to accelerate other deployments around the world. Funding is still available for operators to apply for - if you are interested in finding out more about the Fund, please contact Seema Desai, sdesai@gsm.org. More information on each grantee after the jump.

Earlier this week I spoke with Bruno Akpaka, Head of MTN Mobile Money in Ghana. MTN have rapidly grown the network of MTN Mobile Money merchants using a unique approach that is closely linked to their partnership with 9 banks in Ghana. Similarly exciting is the process for opening new customer accounts, which involves capturing the customer's ID with a mobile phone - this provides flexibility and an opportunity to scale the points of registration over time. Read the full interview here.

Roughly six months after the GSMA Central African Mobile Money Roundtable., MTN has now launched MobileMoney in Cameroon, making it the first mobile network operator in the Economic Community of Central African States, to launch a mobile money service. To understand more about their deployment and overall strategy, I recently caught up with Peter Ndongla, the director of MTN Cameroon’s MobileMoney to gain some insights into their service and their journey towards regulatory approval.

A recent study conducted by researchers from Uganda and Sweden, attempts to identify new ways of using mobile money to help the poor. The team studied mobile money users across three MNOs in Uganda. The study provides insights on the current usage of mobile money by exploring different financial transactions of respondents, their relative importance, frequency and alternatives.

Driving customer activation has become one of the prominent challenges facing mobile money programmes. In this video filmed last month during MMU's Working Group in Singapore, Yasmina McCarty discusses the key challenges that operators have faced when it comes to activating customers for mobile money.