Africa’s push to connect its 400 million financially excluded adults to real-time digital payments accelerated sharply in 2025, with five new national instant payment systems going live across the continent and one country, Liberia, deploying an entire national infrastructure in just 73 days, according to the AfricaNenda Foundation’s 2025 Annual Report released this month.
The report, produced by the Africa-based nonprofit that works with central banks and regulators to build inclusive payment infrastructure, confirms that Africa now has 33 domestic instant payment systems across 25 countries, up from 28 the previous year, following launches in Algeria, Eswatini, Libya, Sierra Leone and Somalia.
The Liberia deployment stands as the report’s most striking case study. AfricaNenda supported the Central Bank of Liberia to integrate the country’s two largest mobile money operators into a single national system, beginning in November 2025 and going live on December 16, with zero downtime. From launch through February 12, 2026, the system processed nearly one million transactions totalling more than US$11 million. Government employees who previously waited days for salary payments now receive wages in under a minute into a mobile wallet.
In Rwanda, AfricaNenda supported the modernisation of the eKash system, transitioning it to an open-source architecture built on Mojaloop technology. The upgraded platform, which launched in February 2025, now processes approximately 1.5 million transactions per month, a 40 percent increase on 2024 volumes, and has been deliberately extended to include microfinance institutions and savings and credit cooperatives to reach underserved rural communities.
The report also highlights a significant continental governance development. Through its partnership with the African Union Commission (AUC), AfricaNenda advanced work on a Regulatory Harmonization Framework for Cross-Border Payment Services, designed to enable seamless real-time payments across national borders. The Association of African Central Banks’ Assembly of Governors issued a formal decision instructing its Task Force on Payment Systems Integration to lead the regulatory harmonisation agenda, with the AUC and AfricaNenda in a supporting role. A feasibility study benchmarking global models is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
The report confirmed that Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) Instant Payment, known as NIP, has become the first African instant payment system to achieve mature status on the AfricaNenda Inclusivity Spectrum, meaning it meets the highest standard of access, affordability, transparency and recourse available to end users.
Ghana features directly in the report’s ecosystem work. Clara Arthur, Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhiPSS), participated in the “From Access to Impact” panel at the SIIPS 2025 launch event in Eswatini, representing Ghana’s experience in building inclusive payment infrastructure. Techfocus24 Ghana was among the media outlets represented at AfricaNenda’s annual media coalition training workshop, which focused on building journalists’ capacity to report on instant payment systems as development stories rather than technology stories.
For 2026, AfricaNenda has set four priorities: supporting at least three additional national system launches, expanding financing partnerships to connect projects with development capital, transforming its annual State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) report into a quantitative impact evaluation tool, and launching a virtual Centre of Excellence to share implementation blueprints and inclusive design resources with central banks and payment operators across the continent.
