Thanks to tech savvy youthful population, liberal markets and friendly tech policies, Africa is embracing mobile money technology fast and in a big way.
Mobile
Money is a digital financial service that lets people store, send and receive
money on a basic mobile phone, without requiring a bank account.
Over the
years, however, mobile money has evolved and is no longer just about the
traditional cash-in and cash-out transactions. It has grown to include paying
bills, saving money, lending and enabling cross-border remittances.
According
to GSMA 2017 State of the Industry Report, about $1 billion is now transacted
via mobile money daily, backed by an estimated 690 million registered users
worldwide.
Africa is
dominating the world in the mobile money business, accounting for about 80
percent of global mobile money transactions volume and over half of global
transaction value.
According
to GSMA’s mobile money metrics interactive tool, there are currently 135 live
mobile money services in Sub Saharan Africa out of 276 worldwide.
Out of
5.3 million registered mobile money agents worldwide, 1.8 million are in Africa.
There are
338.4 million accounts in Africa out of 889 million worldwide and 1.2 billion
mobile money transactions valued at $19.9 billion are conducted in Africa
compared to 1.8 billion worldwide valued at $31.5 billion worldwide.
And that
is without any serious adoption in Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria.
668 miles
away from Nigeria, mobile money is not only bigger and growing but a way of
life.
Nearly
one in five Ghanaians are active users of Mobile Money, more than double the
total a year ago.
In June
2016, the Central Bank of Ghana released figures showing that Mobile Money
transactions in Ghana had grown 20 percent since the end of 2015, reaching
679.17 million Ghanaian Cedi ($177.9 million).
In Kenya,
one of global leaders in mobile money technology, things are even more
impressive. Cash transacted via mobile phones hit Sh3.7 trillion in the 12
months through March.
Central
Bank of Kenya (CBK) numbers indicate the volumes transacted between April 2017
and March 2018 increased by Sh219 billion from Sh3.48 trillion in a similar
period a year earlier.
To fully
understand the impact of mobile money in Africa, one needs to venture out of
the noisy crowded urban area and travel to rural areas where for years millions
of unbanked people were condemned to a life of poverty living from hand to
mouth.
With the
entrance of mobile money however sky is the literary the limit.
Nowadays,
millions of farmers have multiple mobile money services at their fingertips
providing all manner of services from providing instant loans, daily market and
weather updates to selling their produce all at the comfort of their farms.
