Examining Challenges Impacting Mobile Money Penetration Levels in Somalia: The Case of Zaad in Mogadishu

2019 dissertation for MSc. The study is intended to examine the challenges that impact on Mobile Money Services (MMS) penetration in the outskirts of the Somali Capital City, Mogadishu. The study presumes that there are challenges and limitations, which influence the adoption and use of MMS technology ensuing onto low levels of penetration. This research is significant because Somalia has been undergoing a civil war for many years, there are few banks and majority of the population relies on MMS.
The study is guided by three explicit objectives that entail understanding what influences customer adoption of MMS in Mogadishu; To identify how user acceptance of mobile money applications affect their penetration levels in Mogadishu and to examine the impact of external factors such as environmental and technological on MMS penetration in Mogadishu.
Evincing from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and relying on a case study of ZAAD in a mixed methods approach, the study finds that levels of MMS penetration have a significant correlation with perceived ease of use with of 1.11 at 5% significant levels. In addition, levels of MMS penetration have a statistically significant correlation with perceived trust at 5% and with environmental factors at 0.67 with 1% level of significance. Conversely, the study finds that technological factors do not have an impact on levels of
penetration.