The Real Strategy Behind Rwanda’s Fintech Passport Deals?
Is Rwanda Building Africa’s Fintech Gateway?
It looks like Rwanda is not trying to become the only door into African fintech markets. It is trying to become the smartest one.
By Ethel Cofie
What Happens when a Private Sector Player becomes Critical National Digital Infrastructure?
The Incidents That Changed the Conversation When Private Systems Become National Critical
A private platform becomes national-critical when its failure stops being “a company incident” and becomes a country incident.
You see it when:
• an outage affects multiple sectors at once (payments, telecoms, government services),
• regulators convene industry players in crisis mode,
• business continuity becomes a public-interest issue, not just an internal SLA.
A Regulator’s Playbook : When a Private Company Becomes Critical National Infrastructure
Most critical infrastructure frameworks in Africa are architecturally sound on paper. Ghana’s Cybersecurity Act, Kenya’s CII Regulations, Nigeria’s 2024 Designation
Continue reading
A Board Governance Playbook : When a Private Company Becomes Critical National Infrastructure
Boards of companies that operate at national scale payment platforms, dominant mobile networks, carrier-neutral data centres need to ask a different set of questions than they currently do. The standard governance framework asks about uptime, cyber risk, and compliance. When you become nationally critical, the questions become sharper.
a private system becomes nationally critical when its failure stops being a company incident and starts being a country incident.
You know you are there when an outage affects multiple sectors simultaneously. When regulators convene industry players in emergency mode. When business continuity is no longer an internal SLA conversation, but a public-interest question.
Examples of private-sector operators that often meet this criteria
This is not a claim that any specific firm has been formally designated as critical infrastructure. It is a practical observation: in many African markets, the private operators below often meet the criteria because of scale, substitutability, cross-sector dependency, and the speed at which disruption becomes a public-interest issue.
1. Subsea cable systems, landing operators, and international capacity providers (private)
Why they often qualify: multi-country spillover, limited short-term substitutes, long repair timelines. (internetsociety.org)
2. Real-time payment platforms operated by private, industry-owned operators
Why they often qualify: when real-time bank transfers become mainstream, they become part of the economy’s “always-on” expectation.
Kenya example: PesaLink states it is operated by Integrated Payment Services Limited (IPSL), a subsidiary of the Kenya Bankers Association, providing 24/7 365 real-time payments for the banking industry. (pesalink.co.ke)
3. Dominant mobile network operators and mobile money platforms (private)
Why they often qualify: network effects + everyday commerce dependence; disruptions immediately affect households, merchants, and service delivery (which is why downtime starts to look like utility maintenance). (the-star.co.ke)
4. Large carrier-neutral data centres hosting essential workloads (private)
Why they often qualify: as regulated and public-interest workloads concentrate into a small number of facilities, continuity risk concentrates too—making resilience and disclosure expectations inevitable.
What event turns us from a national champion into a national risk overnight? If regulators asked for proof of our recovery capability tomorrow, could we provide it cleanly with test results, audit trails, and a dependency map? Do our supplier contracts contain the reporting and recovery responsibilities we would need to honour our obligations to the country? Have we tested recovery under realistic conditions, or only documented it?
The operators who are asking these questions proactively building what might be called an assurance pack, a national incident operating mode, and realistic exit readiness before they are forced to are the ones who will shape how regulation lands. The ones who wait will be regulated reactively, in the aftermath of the next incident, with less influence over the design of what follows.
DOWNLOAD THE PLAY BOOK FOR A PROACTIVE BOARD APPROACH INSTEAD OF A REACTIVE APPROACH
Africa is investing in digital infrastructure, but the leverage sits with whoever controls the platforms and the contracts.
Africa is investing in digital infrastructure, but the leverage sits with whoever controls the platforms and the contracts.
Continue reading
A Mobile Money CEO Takes Over Retail? What Is Absa Actually Doing ?
One of the ways I tend to deduce the strategy of an organization is to observe who they hire, so when Absa Group appointed Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, CEO of M-PESA Africa, to lead its Personal and Private Banking operations across the continent, effective April 1, 2026. a continental role spanning both personal and private banking. And hiring someone who built Africa’s largest everyday, money ecosystem rather than a traditional banker signals something fundamental: retail banking in Africa is being re, architected around daily transaction flows, not product, led strategies. I was intrigued about what that meant for Absa strategic direction .
Continue reading
When the Mammoth Moves: The MTN Group Bets That Might Reshape Fintech Strategy and the Questions Regulators Could Start Asking Across the Continent
Do I write quite a bit about MTN , Yes Guilty as charged, my reasoning is simple: MTN is a mammoth, and in platform markets, mammoths reshape the terrain so its best if you work in the ecosystem to have a keen eye on the moves its makes
So understanding MTN’s GLG 2026 signal, “3 Platforms, One MTN,” matters for two reasons: it tells fintechs how distribution and rails will evolve, and it tells regulators what new market-structure, standards, and data-power questions they will need to ask as telecoms, fintech, and digital infrastructure converge.
Locked Out, Then Forced to Innovate: Let’s talk about PayPal’s Nigeria move
For years, PayPal access in Nigeria created an asymmetry: Nigerians could buy from the world, but getting paid by the world was constrained and uneven at scale.
When a global platform that acts like the default “trust badge” for online payments limits receiving in a market as large as Nigeria, it doesn’t just frustrate users. It shapes what gets built, what gets funded, and which business models survive.
So yes, there is resentment. And it is justified. Because the opportunity cost isn’t a feeling ,it’s a decade of limitation
The Battle for Africa’s Mobile Money: Mastercard builds ON mobile money,Visa builds AROUND mobile money,Chinese players build AGAINST mobile money.
The Battle for Africa’s Mobile Money: Mastercard builds ON mobile money,Visa builds AROUND mobile money,Chinese players build AGAINST mobile money.
Nigeria’s 2023 cash crisis revealed who was ready for Africa’s digital future. When banks crashed and ATMs ran dry, two Chinese-backed apps—OPay and PalmPay—kept working while Nigerian banks scrambled.
Meanwhile, Mastercard was closing a $200 million deal with MTN’s mobile money division. Visa was launching its Africa Fintech Accelerator. And in Shenzhen, Transsion Holdings watched its payments app capture millions of users.
Three wildly different bets on the same market: Africa’s mobile money ecosystem, which processed $1.1 trillion in 2024, where cash still dominates 90%+ of retail payments, and where 1.4 billion people are going digital.
The Real AfCFTA Gap Isn’t Trade. It’s Trust.
AfCFTA Needs a Data Rail: Why African SMEs Need a Data Passport AfCFTA’s big promise is simple: an African business
Continue reading