Zambia has an inclusive & progressive mobile money landscape: An example to the rest of SADC

On our recent trip to Zambia for the Inaugural AfCFTA Youth Symposium we could resist taking a look at the mobile money landscape in the country. It was remarkable to get a different perspective of what things on the ground looked like, apart from going over the Bank of Zambia's reports.

The mobile money space in Zambia, at street level, was vibrant. We dare say you were not out of earshot of an Airtel, MTN, or Zamtel agent wherever you were in the Central Business District of Lusaka. What this suggested, at least to us, was that the Zambian Central Bank, in its very official and professional reading reports, was underselling things a little bit.

What the data says was given colour by transacting and interacting with as many mobile money agents as we could in our time in Lusaka... For one thing, a good chunk of people seemed to have more than one mobile money account from the different operators. It must be said that this is after the Bank of Zambia launched the National Financial Switch in 2019 (although it was operational in 2018) which allows for interoperability across all of the instruments in the National Payments System.

The initiative further fills the void that exists in rural areas where traditional financial services like bank accounts and branches are not easily accessible. More than anything else, it allows for mobile money wallets to become a cornerstone of financial inclusion for marginalised communities. It is strange that some people choose to have multiple mobile money wallets even though there is interoperability, but it might just be a case of playing the game of "whose charges are better".