Financial Inclusion for Poverty Alleviation: The Role of Islamic Finance in Bangladesh

Abstract

Knowledge has been recognized a long time ago as a key source of economic growth, and a valuable asset can be leveraged, particularly in the globalization era that connected world economic activities. The revaluation of information and communications technology (ICT) as the main driver of the knowledge economy through the hardware and software applications helped to integrate the world economies. The sustainability of knowledge economy relied on knowledge competitive companies and economies. Sudan needs to improve the existing pillars of knowledge economy based on common economic foundations such as good governance and rule of law, education and health services, research and development, and promoting saving and investment. It should be noted that developing human capital (skilled workers) is prerequisite of developing and implementing ICT applications in Sudan’s economic sector with the right human skills ICT will facilitate the economic activities as technology in general and ICT, in particular, are facilitators that need the right human skills to function it. To develop a competitive edge in a knowledge-based economy, Sudan would need a highly skilled labor force. The results of this study will be useful for ICT policy formulation in Sudan as a foundation of knowledge-based economic development. In this context, a comparison of the contributions of ICT to productivity growth in each of the East Asian countries provides guidelines for the policymakers in Sudan to formulate appropriate national and international ICT policies. The findings from this study will also help in the policy formulation in promoting ICT investment and in developing the human capital and infrastructure needed to support the effective use of the technology in Sudan. It is possible that Sudan can capitalize on its synergy with the other nations and make full use of the competitive advantages in other countries to overcome its insufficiencies. In that case, Sudan will be able to accelerate the movement toward a technology-savvy nation that is achieved by Japan, South Korea, China, and the rest of East Asia and other countries. The significant contribution of this study is that this extends the UTAUT model with the inclusion of six additional variables, namely, previous experience, banking needs, perceived self-efficacy, awareness, perceived credibility, and perceived financial cost factors, to study MF customers’ intention to use M-banking. The second significant contribution is that TOE framework developed by Tornatzky et al. (1990) was also extended by adding variables related to the adoption of M-banking within the organization and environment contexts in Sudan such as business model, market and products, and partner collaboration.