In 2014, an estimated 2 billion adults lacked access to a transaction account, excluding them from the formal financial system.
In response to this, the World Bank Group pledged to achieve Universal Financial Access by 2020.
The goal of this initiative was to ensure that adults around the world could have access to a transaction account or an electronic instrument to store, send and receive money.
Despite their efforts, many people around the world are still unbanked.
Digital Payments Are Growing In Popularity In Africa
Africa's adoption of digital payments is amongst the fastest in the world.
The continent also has the fastest-growing rate of mobile owners, with 44% of the population owning a mobile device in 2018.
Unique mobile subscribers are also expected to reach 634 million by 2025.
Mobile payments in Africa have been growing rapidly with over $495 billion worth of transactions taking place during 2020, through over 562 million user accounts.
However, despite this massive growth, there's still little trust in online payments.
This has led to a large, informal, and fragmented payment system made up of banks, local card networks, mobile wallets, and other payment systems.
Africa's digital payments system is very large and untapped.
If this large payment system were to be unified under one system, this would offer enormous potential for the digital payments industry and Africa's economy.
ADA Pay In Africa
As part of their goals to connect people all over the globe, World Mobile Group, a blockchain-based mobile network has partnered with COTI to bring ADA Pay to retailers and merchants in Africa.
World Mobile leverages COTI’s technology to provide developing regions access to financial services.
Using World Mobile’s network, COTI’s ADA Pay enables users to pay with ADA, Cardano's native cryptocurrency.
The DJED stablecoin has also been integrated into the World Mobile ecosystem, making transactions more seamless due to less volatility.
ADA Pay has already partnered with various African NGOs and charities, and so far the protocol has processed almost 100,000 ADA (around $100k) in donations.
World Mobile’s services will generate transactions that will be settled on both the settlement layer (Cardano’s public blockchain) and in the WMC layer (World Mobile Chain).
African retailers who are World Mobile Network will be able to use ADA Pay to accept crypto payments.
Initially, the partners will focus their efforts on Zanzibar and greater Tanzania.
They will use a blockchain-based approach to provide an internet connection to people in the region with renewable energy.
The process is part of the "Smart Village" system, where fiber optics and unlicensed spectrum are used to connect multiple Air Nodes.
This creates a mesh network that reaches the village.
In case you're wondering, unlicensed spectrum refers to radio systems that are open for shared use by an unlimited number of compliant users.
Air Nodes are hardware devices that provide internet connectivity and access to local users via the Internode API.
A mesh network is a group of devices that act as a single Wi-Fi network, so there are multiple sources of Wi-Fi around an area.
Based on the IOG Atala PRISM solution, the partners will build a network node on top of Cardano’s blockchain infrastructure.
The network will be used by business owners and will operate as local relays to provide “affordable” local internet connections.
To access it, users can subscribe via Atala PRISM.
This way, they can gain access to digital banking, healthcare, and essential services.
Conclusion
Digital payments are growing in popularity across Africa; however, a lot of people are still unbanked.
Crypto payments could be helpful in increasing the number of people with electronic payment accounts.