get latest news from West Africa

Consider, for a moment, the sheer absurdity of this sentence: Africa invented mobile money, leads the world in its adoption, processes almost a trillion dollars a year through it, and still cannot move that money freely within its own borders.
This is not rhetoric. It is accounting. Kenya’s M-Pesa launched in 2007 and rewrote the global conversation about financial inclusion. Today, Africa has over 500 million active mobile money accounts, more than any other region on earth. The continent’s digital payments market is projected to exceed $40 billion by 2027. Transactions processed through mobile money now exceed $830 billion annually. These are not the numbers of a backwater. These are the numbers of a financial force.
And yet. A Ghanaian entrepreneur seeking to pay a Nigerian manufacturer must navigate a labyrinth of correspondent banks, foreign exchange spreads, compliance hurdles, and days-long settlement delays. It is difficult to make payments across borders in many African countries, in some, it is impossible. There is no such thing as a smooth payment system across Africa. It is only somewhat there. It is patchy.
While a Congolese student in Brazzaville, paying school fees to a Rwandan institution can afford to do so through the Mobile Money system, a Senegalese textile merchant trying to source fabric from a Moroccan supplier loses margin at every transaction to infrastructure designed consciously or not to keep African commerce expensive, slow, and small.
Africa has a population of 1.4 billion people. Its GDP sits between $3 trillion and $4 trillion. More than half of its population is under the age of 30. According to the Mo Ibrahim 2017 Forum Report, Africa’s youth population would almost double from 230 to 452 million between 2015 and 2050. By every human and economic measure, this is a continent on the edge of enormous potential. But potential that cannot be activated is not power. It is frustrating.
Africa does not have a payments innovation problem. It has a payment integration problem. And until those in power decide that the second problem matters as much as celebrating the first, the continent will keep running brilliantly in place.

The paradox at the centre
Let us be precise about the contradiction. Within individual African countries, mobile money has achieved something genuinely remarkable. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire, millions of people who were once invisible to formal finance now save, borrow, pay, and invest through their phones. The innovation is real. The impact on lives is tangible and measurable. The engineering and entrepreneurship behind it is world-class, with more room for scalability.
But genius is not integration. And what African digital finance has built, beneath all the justified celebration, is a patchwork of national silos dressed up as a continental revolution. M-Pesa, Orange Money, and MTN MoMo are beginning to talk to each other, but only in patches, through intermediaries, at a cost, and in select corridors. They do not yet speak the same language on a continental scale. What they need is one voice, not individual soundbites.
Here is the cruel irony: a European citizen moving money across the EU faces fewer structural barriers than an African moving money across two neighbouring African countries. The European payments system, built over decades through deliberate political will and regulatory coordination, delivers near-instant, low-cost cross-border settlement. African traders, meanwhile, often find it cheaper and faster to route payments through European correspondent banks, paying European fees, enriching European intermediaries, than to move value directly between two African cities.
That is not a technology failure. That is an institutional failure of historic proportions.
And what African digital finance has built, beneath all the justified celebration, is a patchwork of national silos dressed up as a continental revolution. M-Pesa, Orange Money, and MTN MoMo are beginning to talk to each other, but only in patches, through intermediaries, at a cost, and in select corridors.

The everyday cost
A Malawian freelancer billing a Nigerian client. A Cameroonian family sending remittances home from Ghana. A Kenyan startup is paying an Ivorian software developer. A West African smallholder sourcing inputs from across the ECOWAS region. For each of these people, and millions more, fragmented cross-border payments are not an inconvenience. They are a structural tax on ambition, levied daily by an infrastructure that was never truly designed to support African commerce.
Fragmentation is a choice
There is a version of this story that blames history. Colonial-era borders, Balkanised telecommunications licensing regimes, and inherited currency architectures did not emerge from nowhere. They were imposed, and they persist in part because dismantling them requires political work that is unglamorous, slow, and unlikely to get anyone elected.
But history is not destiny. And the time for attributing today’s failures exclusively to yesterday’s colonizers has passed. The tools to solve cross-border payment fragmentation exist. They are not theoretical.
The cost of remittances to Africa
The cost of remittances to Africa remains the most expensive in the world. Costs exceed the global average and above the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% by 2030. By late 2024, the average cost when sending $200 to Africa was approximately 7.9% to 8.37%. Used to be 9.8% in 2016.
As a result of the high cost, Africa notably loses $5 billion a year on remittance charges alone. There is a charge of 7 to 10% on every remittance made to Africa.
To address the high cost of remittances, and remove bottlenecks, and solve the challenge of cross-border payments in Africa, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) was launched. PAPSS is a centralized payment and settlement system that allows local currency trade transactions. It is designed to make transactions among businesses instant and direct, and to cut out intermediaries who contribute to financial losses. But its integration seems slow and painful.
AfCFTA
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was launched in 2019, and trading under the regime began in 2021. As of December 2025, 49 out of the 55 countries on the continent have ratified and deposited their documents with the AfCFTA Secretariat in Accra. Depositing the documents is the first step to implementing the Agreement. The AfCFTA was designed to become the world’s largest free trade area within Africa. But its full realization has dragged on at a snail’s pace.
Bilateral interoperability agreements have been struck between individual markets. Regional bodies have issued frameworks. Consultants have written reports. Ministers have attended summits and posed for photographs, and still, the friction remains. Still, the everyday user pays the price. Still, the continental economy is denied the velocity it deserves.
The problem is no longer a shortage of frameworks. The problem is a shortage of urgency and an excess of vested interests that benefit from things staying exactly as they are.
Every year that African cross-border payments remain fragmented is a year that the continent donates billions in intermediation fees, lost productivity, and suppressed trade to the very global system it claims to want independence from.

Who profits from the friction
Follow the money. Fragmentation is not neutral. When African transactions must route through London or New York, when international wire fees extract 7–10% from remittances that should cost a fraction of that, when African businesses surrender margin to currency conversion spreads that exist only because no direct settlement infrastructure is in place, someone is profiting. That someone is rarely African.
But let us not be naive about where interests lie closer to home. Some telecom operators have little commercial incentive to open their mobile money platforms to competitors. Some central banks guard regulatory turf with the ferocity of sovereigns defending territory. Some banks, incumbent institutions that have built profitable businesses around inefficiencies, benefit quietly and structurally from every day that cheaper, faster, African-owned cross-border infrastructure does not exist.
This is not a conspiracy. It is deliberate institutional blandness: structures persist as long as the forces sustaining them outweigh the forces pushing for change. The question is whether African leaders, in government, in business, in finance, are willing to be the force that tips the balance.
The demographic dividend that is being squandered
Africa is the youngest continent on earth. More than half of its 1.4 billion people are under 30. This is widely cited as a demographic dividend, a future workforce, a wave of consumers, a generation of entrepreneurs. But a demographic dividend only pays out when the institutions surrounding young people give them the tools to build.
What tools does the continent currently offer a 24-year-old in Nairobi who wants to build a business serving clients in Dakar, Kigali, and Accra simultaneously? She has a smartphone. She has ambition. She has the digital literacy to work with global platforms.
But the moment she tries to receive payment from a client across an African border or pay a supplier in another African country, she runs into a wall: high fees, unreliable rails, compliance complexity designed for large institutions, and settlement times from the previous century.
She will likely route around the African financial system entirely. She will use Stripe, Wise, or PayPal, paying their fees, enriching their shareholders, and building their network effects. Not because she is disloyal to the idea of African commerce. But because the African financial system has not built something worthy of her loyalty.
This is not a peripheral problem. It is the central problem. Because if Africa’s most talented young entrepreneurs are systematically bypassing African financial infrastructure, then the demographic dividend will pay out, just not in Africa.
What must actually happen
Stop celebrating local wins as if they were continental victories. An interoperable payment network inside Ghana is an achievement. It is not a solution. A working bilateral corridor between Kenya and Tanzania is real progress. It is not a strategy. A multilateral corridor in West Africa – from Abidjan through Accra to Lome, through Port-Novo to Lagos to Cabo Verde is not simply development, it is civilization. Africa does not need more proof-of-concept. It needs a commitment, political, regulatory, and commercial, to the full architecture of continental financial integration.
That means genuine operationalization of PAPSS with the participation of central banks that have so far treated it as a photo opportunity. It means regulatory harmonization that actually binds within the African Union and its regional economic communities, rather than aspirational frameworks that go unimplemented. It means mobile money portability across borders as a standard, not a bilateral favour negotiated on a case-by-case basis. It means settlement infrastructure built at a continental scale, not patched together from bilateral agreements whose coverage is as patchy as the political relationships underpinning them.
It means fintech founders building cross-border products, not waiting for regulators to catch up — and it means regulators building sandboxes fast enough that founders do not have to choose between innovation and compliance. It means African investors funding the infrastructure layer, not just the applications on top of it.
And it means, let us say this clearly, that the heads of state who signed AfCFTA must treat payment interoperability as the foundational precondition for everything the treaty is supposed to achieve. You cannot build a continental free trade area on the back of a fragmented payments system. It is like building a highway and forgetting to construct the bridges.
The bigger stakes
This is ultimately not just a fintech story. It is a story about whether Africa enters the mid-21st century as an economic actor or as an economic supplier, exporting raw materials and young talent while importing the financial rails through which its own value flows.
The countries that control the payments infrastructure of the future will exercise enormous geopolitical and economic leverage. That infrastructure is being built right now, by American platforms, Chinese state-backed systems, and European regulated entities. Africa has a narrowing window to build its own. To establish an African financial commons: a shared infrastructure through which the continent’s commerce, remittances, digital trade, and capital flows can circulate at low cost, at speed, under African governance.
That window does not stay open indefinitely. Every year of delay is a year in which external platforms deepen their network effects in African markets, in which talented engineers and entrepreneurs place bets on infrastructure that is not African-owned, in which the architecture of dependency is quietly reinforced.
Africa does not have a payments innovation problem. It has a payment integration problem. The tools exist. The precedents exist. The urgency exists at street level, in the markets, in the lives of millions of people for whom cross-border friction is not a policy abstraction but a daily tax on ambition.
What is missing is the decision, by those with the power to make it, that continental financial integration is not a long-term aspiration but an immediate, non-negotiable precondition for everything else the continent says it wants: industrialization, youth employment, intra-African trade, geopolitical relevance, and economic sovereignty.
The continent that gave the world mobile money is more than capable of building the infrastructure to move that money freely within itself. The only honest question left is whether the people in power will stop treating fragmentation as an acceptable condition of doing business, and start treating it for what it is: Africa’s most expensive, most self-inflicted, and most inexcusable wound.
The infrastructure of the future is being built today. Either Africa builds it for itself on its own terms, at a continental scale, with the urgency this moment demands, or it will spend the next generation paying rent to those who did.

The choice, at last, belongs entirely to Africa.
By Emmanuel K Dogbevi & MacJordan Degadjor
This editorial was first published on The African Century Review