LocationsFrom invisible to investable: seven lessons on interoperability from the ground.
Africa Doesn't Have a Fintech Problem. It Has a Plumbing Problem.
March 30, 2026
By Maxwell Gomera
The continent that invented mobile money is being held back not by a lack of innovation, but by a failure to connect the innovations it already has.
Let me begin with a face.
A smallholder farmer. Skilled. Hard-working. Growing real food that feeds real people. Unable to access a single loan from a formal bank. Not because she is not creditworthy. Because she is invisible.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 140 million agricultural payment recipients are still paid only in cash - three in four of all farmers receiving payments. Not because they lack phones. Not because fintechs haven't built solutions. But because the systems that need to talk to each other - don't.
Last week, more than 3,000 policymakers, fintech founders, bankers, regulators and development institutions gathered at the Kigali Convention Centre for the Inclusive FinTech Forum 2026 - co-hosted by the Kigali International Financial Centre (KIFC), the National Bank of Rwanda, and the Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN). Delegates arrived from across Africa and far beyond: India, Ireland, Luxembourg, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Latin America and many others. In the land of a thousand hills and fourteen million smiles, the conversation was unmistakably global. But the questions were deeply African.
The forum was graced by Rwanda's Prime Minister, a signal of how seriously Rwanda's leadership takes the digital finance agenda. Strong calls also came from leaders who understand exactly what is at stake. Rwanda's Minister of ICT Paula Ingabire, Equity Group CEO James Mwangi, and KIFC CEO Hortense Mudenge each made the same essential argument: Africa's digital future depends not just on innovation, but on infrastructure that connects markets and makes them legible. Mwangi put it directly - the future of finance will not be built on apps. It will be built on shared digital rails. The message from the stage was clear. Africa is not short of innovation. What matters is whether the pieces connect.
The Real Problem: Visibility
On a panel on Digital Public Infrastructure and agriculture, the central issue emerged quickly. This is not a technology problem. It is a visibility problem.
South Africa's township economy makes this vivid. More than 150,000 spaza shops operate across the country, serving roughly 30 million South Africans every day and collectively running an economy approaching one trillion rand. Most of them cannot access formal credit - not because they lack customers, stock, or commercial instincts, but because their transactions are invisible to banks.
The same is true for farmers across the continent. Digital Public Infrastructure - when identity systems, payment rails and data platforms connect - changes that entirely. It makes economic actors legible. And legibility is the bridge between exclusion and opportunity: invisible to legible, legible to creditworthy, creditworthy to financed.
"In South Africa, our biggest problem isn't that banks won't lend to farmers. It's that banks can't see farmers. Fix the visibility problem and the credit problem largely solves itself."
Seven Lessons from the Ground
These are not theories drawn from a boardroom. They come from walking the streets of Alexandra and Sandton, sitting with traders, visiting farms, and watching systems succeed and fail. There is a 20-minute drive between Alexandra and Sandton. The gap in economic infrastructure between them is a generation. That gap - between what people say they need and what they actually need - is where the best design decisions live.
Lesson 1
Listen with your eyes.
Go and see for yourself. Walk the markets. Visit the farms. Sit with the traders. People often say what they think policymakers want to hear. The real insight comes from what you observe. Many of the most important design decisions live in that gap between what people say and what they actually need.
Lesson 2
Build for Africa - not a version of it imagined elsewhere.
Too many systems are imported and awkwardly adapted. Africa's financial infrastructure must be designed for African realities: informal markets, multilingual populations, intermittent connectivity and complex cross-border trade. Those are not obstacles to work around. They are the design brief.
Lesson 3
Interoperability is political, not technical.
The standards exist. The APIs exist. What blocks connection is almost always incentive - banks protecting market share, platforms protecting data, institutions protecting legacy systems. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System shows enormous promise, but implementation across markets remains uneven - a reminder that political will must match technical design. Someone with authority has to mandate openness. Voluntary frameworks produce patchwork.
"We keep asking fintechs to solve problems that only governments can solve. Shared infrastructure is a public good. It doesn't make itself."
Lesson 4
Start with trust, not technology.
Farmers and traders will not share their data - the foundation of any interoperable system - unless they see a direct, tangible benefit quickly. Design the user value first. The infrastructure follows. Without that tangible first win, adoption stalls regardless of how elegant the technology is.
Lesson 5
Design from the margins.
If the system works for the most excluded person - the rural farmer with a basic phone and patchy signal, the informal border trader paid in a currency she cannot spend at home - it will work for everyone. Design up from the margins, not down from the centre. The reverse approach consistently produces systems that exclude the very people they were built to serve.
Lesson 6
Don't replicate. Connect.
Africa often falls into the trap of building new platforms instead of connecting the powerful systems it already has. The mobile money rails, the payment infrastructure, the identity systems - they exist across the continent. EcoCash in Zimbabwe showed what is possible when you build on existing rails rather than replacing them. New architectures, including stablecoin frameworks, offer the next horizon. Duplication is the enemy of interoperability.
Lesson 7
Find the neutral convenor.
Interoperability needs someone all parties trust enough to set and enforce the rules. That is rarely a private company with a commercial stake in the outcome. It is usually a central bank, a development institution, or a body with genuine public legitimacy. Without a trusted convenor, you get negotiation without resolution.
From Invisible to Investable
These issues go far beyond fintech. Intra-African trade accounts for just 16 percent of the continent's total trade - compared with 70 percent within the European Union. Africa represents nearly 18 percent of the world's population yet accounts for less than 3 percent of global trade: a stark indicator of how fragmented our markets remain. Cross-border traders routinely lose 20 to 25 percent on currency conversion. A $300 business transaction can attract over $100 in fees. A container delayed at port because a payment failed can cost $1,500 in twelve days. These are not edge cases. They are the daily reality of African entrepreneurs.
Interoperable payment systems, digital identity frameworks, and open data standards can change that. The AfCFTA is a vision. DPI is how you build the roads that make it real. The UNECA projects a cumulative $450 billion GDP gain by 2035 - but only if the plumbing works.
South Africa has shown what is possible. Through UNDP's DIME programme, we are conducting a full census of the township economy - registering spaza shop owners with verified digital identities, capturing transaction data, building credit footprints that banks can finally see. Our Township Spark blended finance facility then steps in to unlock real credit. Not charity. A loan earned by being legible. The farmer model is identical: digital identity linked to land records, crop data, payment history. Invisible to legible. Legible to creditworthy. Creditworthy to financed.
Kigali reminded me why this work matters. Hortense Mudenge and the KIFC team, the National Bank of Rwanda, and GFTN deserve real credit for creating a forum that pushes the conversation from ambition to execution. But forums don't build plumbing. That requires governments to write agriculture explicitly into DPI architecture - not as a downstream beneficiary, but as a foundation. It requires financiers to update their risk models: a data-verified farmer is not the same credit risk as an invisible one. And it requires platform builders to choose interoperability over lock-in.
When systems connect, markets grow. When markets grow, the continent's 1.4 billion people - the youngest, most entrepreneurial population on earth - can trade with each other at scale. Interoperability is not a technical preference. It is an economic destiny.
I began with a face. Skilled. Hard-working. Feeding people. Invisible. DPI is how we end that invisibility - not through aid, but through infrastructure. Africa has the vision. It has the talent. What it needs now is the infrastructure that allows its entrepreneurs to see each other, trade with each other, and build prosperity together.
I am grateful to the UNDP colleagues who made the week what it was - Fatmata Lovetta Sesay, UNDP Resident Representative for Rwanda, Nshuti Mbabazi of the Better Than Cash Alliance, and Natalie Jabangwe, CEO of Timbuktoo, among others whose presence and insights sharpened this thinking.
Maxwell Gomera
UNDP Resident Representative, South Africa | Director, Africa Sustainable Finance Hub
These remarks were delivered on a panel on Digital Public Infrastructure, Interoperability and Agriculture at the Inclusive FinTech Forum 2026, Kigali, Rwanda, 12 March 2026.
IFF 2026 was co-hosted by the Kigali International Financial Centre (KIFC), the National Bank of Rwanda, and the Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN), under the theme: 'Shaping the Future of Inclusive Finance: Innovation. Impact. Connection
Related
content
content
