When Daré Okoudjou founded MFS Africa (now Onafriq) in 2009, he had one simple way to measure success – ‘to facilitate access for my mom’s honey business in Porto-Novo, Benin, to collect payments from her customers from across the continent – and to make the process as easy as a phone call’.

The fintech company is the bridge that links different payment systems and agents across borders – ‘a network of networks’, if you will. Today it ensures digital interoperability across 43 countries in Africa, connecting almost 1 billion mobile money wallets and 500 million bank accounts.

Most recently, in August 2025, it introduced a new mobile money feature in Ghana, giving users flexibility in how they access and move their money. The added functionality enables seamless card-to-wallet and wallet-to-card transfers.

Ike Anison, a director at Onafriq, explains that the new feature ‘is about giving people the freedom to move money the way that works best for them. We know mobile money is the dominant store of value for millions of Africans, but it isn’t always accepted for all types of transactions. By linking wallets to cards, we’re giving users more options to transact across local and global ecosystems’.

Almost two decades after it was introduced in Africa (by Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007), mobile money has grown up.

‘Mobile money has emerged as a powerful driver of financial inclusion and economic growth,’ Vivek Badrinath, GSMA director-general, says in a 2025 report on the state of the mobile money industry.

‘We are well-positioned for the next wave of expansion, where mobile money emerges as the preferred payment service, driving business growth, strengthening economies and shaping a better future for all,’ he says.

Ghana is a good example of how mobile money is empowering Africans financially. According to KPMG’s 2024 West Africa bank customer survey, Ghana is a leader in the mobile money space, being the only African country with fully interoperable, multiple instant payment systems.

In addition, the World Bank’s 2025 Global Findex Database on connectivity and financial inclusivity shows that the penetration rate of mobile money technology is rocketing in Ghana – from 13% in 2012 to an expected 60%-plus in 2026. The Bank of Ghana, meanwhile, puts the number of active mobile money accounts in that country at about 23.5 million in 2024, up from 14.5 million in 2019. In fact, the bank reported in October 2024 that the total value of mobile money transactions hit a record GHS2.3 trillion for the first 10 months of that year, compared with GHS1.3 trillion during the same period in 2023.

The KPMG survey shows that 73% of Ghanaian respondents used mobile money weekly, 32% used it to transfer funds, 28% used it to pay bills and more than half (54%) to buy airtime. By comparison, only 22% used ATM withdrawals weekly.

More importantly, mobile money’s penetration into rural Ghana is almost 50%, the third highest in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank.

For Ghana at least, mobile money has benefits beyond its primary objective of moving cash from person to person.

In a recent research paper, business analyst Kwame Boateng Akomeah writes that mobile money acts as a springboard for the adoption of other digital technologies – with lending platforms such as Branch and Fido using mobile money transaction histories to assess creditworthiness, and insurtech platforms allowing premium payments using mobile money.

It’s also helping Ghana’s government services collect money owed, with more than 60% of National Health Insurance Premiums collected via mobile money, and mobile money rates payments making up 50% of person-to-business transactions in 2023. In addition, during Covid, the Ghana government was able to pay out GHC100 billion in grants to beneficiaries using mobile money.

‘This widespread integration of mobile money into public services has not only enhanced convenience, but also reduced leakages, improved transparency and brought more Ghanaians into the formal economy,’ writes Akomeah.

Mobile money is also having an impact on employment in some regions. Writing in a 2023 online post, Onafriq’s Okoudjou pointed out that about 1 million youth across sub-Saharan Africa were expected in 2025 to have informal employment in the mobile sector itself, often as mobile money agents.

Mobile money has also made a positive contribution to GDP globally, with the GSMA report finding that ‘between 2013 and 2023, a 10-percentage point rise in mobile money adoption was found to have increased GDP by 0.6–1%’. As of 2023, the total GDP of countries with a mobile money service was more than US$720 billion higher than it would have been without mobile money, according to the GSMA.

At a regional level, sub-Saharan Africa saw a significant increase in mobile money’s contribution to GDP, from about US$150 bil-lion in 2022 to US$190 billion in 2023. Its contribution to GDP in East and West Africa is rising, but the rate has slowed in East Africa while it has grown in West Africa, from 4.1% to 5%.

The GSMA confirms that mobile money has had a greater impact on the GDP of West African countries than elsewhere on the continent. In Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Liberia, it contributed more than 5% to GDP. ‘In Southern Africa, where mobile money is less established, contributions to GDP generally remain lower than 5%,’ the report says.

Mobile money adoption in Southern Africa has been slower than in West and East Africa, with only 5 million active 30-day accounts in 2023 compared to 84 million in West Africa and 118 million in East Africa.

The lack of commercial viability caused mobile network operator MTN to decommission its mobile money app MTN MoMo in its home market in 2016 after four years of operation, though it continued to operate in other regions. It has since returned – in 2020 – with Ubank as a partner, leveraging the bank’s presence in rural markets and mining commu-nities. This time it seems to be sticking – as of April 2025, the app boasted 13 million regis-tered users in South Africa, with its revenue growing 27.6% in the first quarter of 2025.

It has now partnered with Mastercard to launch a prepaid virtual card, granting mobile money customers access to 100 million acceptance points across the world, as well as allowing MoMo merchants to accept card payments across borders. Taking advantage of lower interest rates, as of 1 September 2025, the MoMo app offers instant access to competitive home loan rates and pre-approved home loans.

‘We have always believed that MoMo, which focuses on driving financial inclusion by addressing the lack of traditional banking services, particularly in underserved areas, could play a greater role in people’s lives,’ says Kagiso Mothibi, CEO of MTN’s fintech in South Africa.

‘MoMo is now about more than payments; it’s about creating opportunities, personal control and the chance to play its role in beginning your journey to home ownership and building a future legacy,’ he says.

It is true that mobile money has been able to take off in sub-Saharan Africa because of the sheer number of people who do not have a traditional bank account, but as Okoudjou writes, ‘cards remain the preferred payment method in many instances. We must shift the narrative towards facilitating interoperability between mobile money and cards, promoting adoption at scale’.

Okoudjou envisages a borderless mobile money market, ‘allowing African consumers and businesses to make payments to any destination, online or offline’.

To this end, Onafriq is partnering with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched in 2022 by the African Export-Import Bank, the AU and African Continental Free Trade Area to enable seamless cross-border payment transactions in local currencies across Africa.

PAPSS and Onafriq are piloting a new cross-border payment service for outbound mobile money transactions in Ghana, mainly to aid SMEs. ‘This pioneering service aims to address the existing challenges of high transaction costs and opaque exchange rates, while further integrating informal cross-border transactions into the formal payment systems,’ according to the company.

There’s no word from Okoudjou on how his mom’s honey business is faring, but it’s thanks to mobile money that millions of Africans have access to financial services that used to be beyond their reach.

By Robyn Leary
Images: Gallo/Getty Images