Meet the winners of the Mobile Money and Financial Inclusion in Tanzania challenge

Only 16.7% of the population in Tanzania has a bank account. But an additional 48.6% of Tanzanians who don’t have a bank account do have other types of formal financial services, primarily mobile money.

For people who have been traditionally excluded from the formal financial system in Africa and other developing markets, mobile money has become an important entry point to financial inclusion. While mobile money is a tool for transferring money among people and businesses/other institutions, it is increasingly becoming a platform for people to access a broad range of financial services, including savings, credit, and insurance.

The objective of this competition is to create a machine learning model to predict which individuals are most likely to use mobile money and other financial services (savings, credit, and insurance).

This model can help mobile money providers target new clients and markets across Tanzania more effectively, and also help financial services providers cross-sell other financial services (savings, credit, and insurance) to the existing mobile money customer base.

This competition is sponsored by HDIF, Data Lab Tanzania, and esri.

About HDIF (www.hdif-tz.org)

HDIF is a Tanzanian non-profit organization that aims to identify and support innovations that have the potential to create social impact in education, health and, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) across Tanzania. With a focus on market driven solutions, HDIF catalyses the development, testing and scaling of innovative models of service delivery, information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), and product solutions in health, education and WASH.

About Data Lab Tanzania (dLab) (dlab.or.tz)

The Tanzania Data Lab (dLab) as an NGO, is a center of activity, connecting the data revolution to national priorities, global commitments and diverse programs and investments. This is done by enabling data analysis and use to become more prominent in decision making in Tanzania. The dLab activities include training in data literacy and analysis, focused content-area data analytics, and the development of “use cases” to showcase how data can be used to improve lives. The dLab will support the development of a roadmap, assisting the country to monitor progress toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

About esri (www.esri.com)

As the global market leader in geographic information systems (GIS), Esri provides the world’s most powerful mapping and spatial analytics software to help organizations everywhere solve problems in real time. We help companies and organizations see data in new ways, improve operational and business results, and unlock their data’s full potential. Using our ArcGIS platform for location intelligence, our customers and users in manufacturing, retail, utilities, telecommunications, government, defense, and dozens of other industries visualize, interpret, analyze, understand and exploit all types of data.

Today, Esri software is deployed in more than 350,000 organizations including the world’s largest cities, most national governments, 75% of the Fortune 500, and more than 11,000 colleges and universities.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.

Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

Datasets and packages

The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition.

The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day. Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.

As the challenge has now closed, the maximum number of submissions per day is 30.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 20% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers 100% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.

If you are in the top 20 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.

If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.

If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).

The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners.

You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.

Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

Reproducibility

• If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
• If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
• Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your submission reproduces.
• We expect full documentation. This includes:

- All data used

- Output data and where they are stored

- Explanation of features used

- Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (no processed data)

- All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)

Data standards:

• Your submitted code must run on the original train, test, and other datasets provided.
• If external data is allowed it must not exceed 1 GB. External data must be freely and publicly available, including pre-trained models with standard libraries. If external data is allowed, any data used should be shared on the discussion forum.
• Packages:

- You must use the most recent versions of packages. Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.

- You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:

• First offence: No prizes or points for 6 months. If you are caught cheating all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months.
• Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points using any other account.

Monitoring of submissions

• We will review the top 20 solutions of every competition when the competition ends.
• We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above).
• If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points.

Further updates and rulings of note:

• Multiple accounts per user, collaboration or membership across multiple teams are not allowed.
• Code may not be shared privately. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform.
• Solutions must use publicly-available, open-source packages only, and all packages must be the most updated versions.
• Solutions must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
• You will be disqualified if you do not respond within the timeframe given in the request for code.

We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

The evaluation metric for this challenge is the Log Loss.

Your submission file should look like:

ID           no_financial_services      other_only       mm_only       mm_plus
<string>          <number>               <number>        <number>      <number>
84324              .034                   .215            .567          .975

1st Place: $750 USD + a 1 Year license for ArcGIS (a value of $250 USD)

2nd Place: $500 USD + a 1 Year license for ArcGIS (a value of $250 USD)

3rd Place: $250 USD + a 1 Year license for ArcGIS (a value of $250 USD)

Each of the top 3 winners will receive a 1 Year license for ArcGIS for Personal Use – full details here.

Competition closes on 30 June 2019

Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.