GSMA Details Ascent of Mobile Money in Sub-Saharan Africa

Mobile money is taking off in Sub-Saharan Africa, says the GSMA.

According to its new report, “State of Mobile Money in Sub-Saharan Africa”, over 40 percent of adults in Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe are active users of mobile money services; and the region accounts for over half of all the mobile money deployments in the world.

While mobile money services in Sub-Saharan Africa used to revolve primarily around airtime top-ups and P2P transactions, the mobile money ecosystem has quickly evolved to include “additional financial services, including bill payments, merchant payments and international remittances,” according to a report summary. These new kinds of transactions almost quadrupled between 2014 and 2016, the GSMA says.

The report is part of the 2017 GSMA Mobile 360 Series, which comprises a handful of regionally-focused conferences around the world, and may offer some encouragement to mobile payments and other FinTech providers seeking to take advantage of the digital and mobile revolutions sweeping across the financial services world.