Africa’s mobile money ecosystem has scaled fast. By 2024, the continent held over 1.1 billion registered mobile money accounts , more than two-thirds of the global total, and sub-Saharan Africa generated 58% of all new active accounts that year, reaching 283 million active users. The IMF’s 2025 Financial Access Survey confirms the momentum: digital transactions in emerging and developing economies surged from 55 per adult in 2017 to 251 per adult by 2024.
Yet GSMA’s 2025 industry data shows 2.3 billion registered accounts globally against only 593 million active on a 30-day basis. Nigeria alone counted 67.9 million registered mobile money accounts in 2024, and active use still trailed registration. The industry’s current favourite explanation for this gap is technical: more interoperability, better APIs, faster rails. That explanation is not wrong. It is just incomplete.
In this #TechTalkThursday edition, we examine what the numbers are really telling us and why closing Africa’s financial inclusion gap requires a different kind of investment entirely.
Where the ‘Better Infrastructure’ Starts and Ends
There is no question that the formal financial layer has advanced. Mobile money accounts across sub-Saharan Africa are now growing faster than traditional deposit accounts, a structural shift that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Instant payment rails enable near real-time settlement, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) has reduced cross-border friction, and by mid-2024, nearly half of Africa’s mobile money providers were offering credit through fintech partnerships. We’ve even seen MTN MoMo become the first non-bank platform to process real-time interbank payments in South Africa via PayShap.
To see this infrastructure at work, look no further than the M-Pesa ecosystem. In a conversation on the TechAfrica News Podcast, Safaricom Group CEO Dr. Peter Ndegwa explained how they’ve evolved:
“We have really accelerated the interaction between M-Pesa and opened it up as an open ecosystem with banks, using APIs. Now, about a third of the transactions on M-Pesa come through APIs, and we have a hundred thousand developers, who are not Safaricom employees, actively integrating businesses into the M-Pesa ecosystem.”
— Dr. Peter Ndegwa, CEO, Safaricom
This distinction matters because payment rails connect institutions, while agent networks connect people. For many first-time users across Africa, the local mobile money agent remains the most important touchpoint in the digital financial ecosystem.
All of that is real progress. And it matters. Interoperability, open APIs, and instant payment rails create the foundation on which broader financial inclusion can be built. Without them, digital finance remains fragmented and difficult to scale.
However, infrastructure alone does not guarantee participation. The further you move from the formal financial layer and toward the rural user, the informal worker, or the first-time account holder, the more inclusion depends on factors that technology cannot solve by itself: affordability, trust, literacy, distribution, and relevance.
The challenge facing the industry today is no longer whether institutions can connect to one another. Increasingly, it is whether the people those institutions are trying to serve can meaningfully participate in the systems being built.
Connectivity Does Not Equal Participation
Device affordability is where the argument sharpens. Dr. Ndegwa made the tension explicit: the M-Pesa super app has five million daily users, but every one of them requires a 4G-enabled device. That single requirement effectively walls off the exact segment of the population that API integration is supposedly designed to serve.
The affordability problem is not unique to one market. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, operators have been pressing regulators to reduce the cost of devices and data, recognising that access to a capable phone is the precondition the whole system rests on. Kenya has made this argument most explicitly, with mobile operators tabling formal proposals for digital reform aimed at lowering the cost of participation. The reality is that active usage rates, agent network reach, and the basic trust required for a first-time user to move from cash to digital don’t shift simply because two institutions have become better connected to each other.
The gender dimension only compounds this. According to the GSMA, the gender gap in mobile money ownership in sub-Saharan Africa remains stubbornly at 25%. While mobile phone ownership is high across the region, smartphone access remains deeply unequal; financial products built on top of that access gap inherit the same exclusion by default.
Affordability is only one side of the inclusion equation. Trust is the other.
Tanzania’s 2025 performance illustrates the secondary risk: as the market moved nearly TZS 255 trillion through mobile payment platforms, it simultaneously saw a massive surge in fraud and consumer protection risks. These failures fall hardest on the first-time users who are now entering the digital economy at scale, users that regulatory frameworks designed for formal banking behaviour were never built to protect in the first place.
The Limits of Interoperability and Last-Mile Reach
The evidence is uncomfortable precisely because the products are not missing. IMF data shows that fintech lending for micro and small enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa surged from 13% to 88% of overall fintech funding between 2020 and 2023. That is not a market failing to show up, but capital arriving without the distribution infrastructure to convert it into sustained user engagement.
Safaricom’s Fuliza and M-Shwari have pushed M-Pesa from a simple payment platform toward a full financial health suite. Airtel Money Uganda has launched mobile credit scoring, and MTN’s aYo is scaling microinsurance across borders. The vision is coherent. Yet adoption data suggests that product availability alone is not translating into sustained engagement. Across mobile money markets, the gap between registered and active accounts remains substantial, indicating that access and usage are still two very different outcomes.
Part of the challenge lies in how products are designed. Many digital lending, savings, and insurance solutions assume income regularity, digital literacy, and predictable financial behaviour. For millions of Africans working in informal economies, income is seasonal, cash flows fluctuate, and financial decisions are often shaped by immediate household needs rather than long-term planning.
In that environment, products that work well on paper can struggle to become part of everyday financial behaviour.
UNCDF’s 2024 data, reaching 30 million individuals across 78 countries, confirms that enterprise finance isn’t a separate conversation from mobile money. It is the same conversation, taken one layer deeper. Ralph Mupita made the aspiration visible:
“Imagine a woman sitting in Kumasi, Ghana, making hair products. On that phone, she holds a digital wallet, she has a website, and she can run basic e-commerce.”
— Ralph Mupita, President and CEO, MTN Group
She is the benchmark. She is also the user the current infrastructure cannot yet consistently serve because the distribution, UX, and regulatory environment required to reach her at scale have not been built.
Redefining Digital Finance from the Ground Up
APIs and interoperable rails remain essential. They define the system’s efficiency and enable the product integrations that eventually reach excluded users. But they are only the first layer. The IMF’s 2025 Financial Access Survey confirms that mobile money has successfully brought millions into the formal system without needing traditional bank accounts. The model works, but it needs a different foundation to go further.
What it needs now is a different foundation underneath it: agent networks dense enough to serve users where digital-only channels stop, product design that reflects irregular incomes and cash-based behaviour, and regulation built for informal participation from the ground up.
The next phase of financial inclusion will not be won by connecting more systems alone. It will be won by reducing the distance between those systems and the realities of everyday users.
Inclusion succeeds when a market trader can access credit that reflects her cash flow, when a first-time smartphone owner can navigate financial services with confidence, and when digital transactions feel safer, cheaper, and more useful than cash.
“The true power of fintech lies in its ability to democratise financial services. It’s not just about competing, it’s about creating opportunities for small businesses and individuals who have been excluded from traditional banking systems.”
— Sitho Mdlalose, CEO, Vodacom South Africa
From Connected Wallets to Active Participants: The Next Phase for Africa
The industry’s current metrics lean heavily on account ownership and wallet registration. Those are important indicators of reach, but they remain incomplete measures of inclusion. They tell us how many people have entered the system, not how many are truly using it.
Participation is the entire point.
The next stage of Africa’s financial inclusion story should be measured by one thing: how many people are meaningfully operating inside the system, on devices they own, at costs they can absorb, through products built for the reality of their lives.
Because the future of mobile money will not be determined by how many wallets are opened. It will be determined by how many people can build economic opportunity through them.
