Fifteen years after mobile banking changed Africa’s economic landscape forever, a new battle is being fought over the direction of the continent’s next major financial leap forward.
On one side stand the continent’s central banks, who are pressing ahead with plans for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as a means of improving financial inclusion, lowering the cost of processing cash, improving cross-border trade and reducing the size of the informal economy. Nigeria made headlines last October as the first major country in the world to launch a CBDC, branded as the eNaira, with more than a dozen other African states currently researching or piloting their own digital currencies.
