Africa middle east

Digitizing Merchant Payments: What Will It Take?

The presentation provides ideas for digital payments to replace cash as the most used mode of retail merchants worldwide.

Cash usage behaviour and its implication for digital payments: A case of Ghana and Nigeria's smallholder cassava value chain

Education programs and awareness campaigns can help improve mobile money usage among smallholder cassava farmers in Nigeria and Ghana. Better agent network and incentives may help too. Read …

Understanding merchant payments landscape 

A new Karandaaz study shows that around 95% of merchants in Pakistan do not accept digital payments. To promote adoption, it calls for creating awareness among users, better infrastructure, interoperability and reliability of services.

Mobile payments: How digital finance is transforming agriculture

This report is based on primary research on agriculture mobile payments initiatives in Ghana, Uganda and Zambia with the aim of understanding the potential of mobile finance for the agricultural sector and how these barriers might be overcome.

Mobile Money and the importance of timely, complete payments to frontline health campaign workers in the fight to eradicate polio: pilot experience from a WHO digital payment platform in Africa

Guide to the Use of Digital Financial Services in Agriculture

This Guidebook provides an easy-to-use tool to understand how digital finance is helping addressing some of the challenges faced by smallholder farmers and includes some interesting use cases from Bangladesh, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.

Ethiopia Digital Payments Strategy: Digital Ethiopia 2025

A digital strategy for Ethiopia inclusive prosperity

Mobile-delivered economic ID for inclusion of SMEs

Unregistered SMEs account for 65% of Nigeria’s GDP. Most of them often struggle to demonstrate their personal and business credentials to service providers and customers. This GSMA research finds that there is a need for new approaches to identity and mobile-delivered ‘economic ID’ solution holds promise.

How to create modern G2P payment systems

New CGAP focus note explores the core idea behind future-ready G2P payments, lays out its advantages and challenges, and describes how governments can create modern G2P payments systems. It draws heavily from ongoing efforts in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

Liberian Teacher ePayments: Stepping Stones to Inclusion

This blog, focussing on case of Liberia, discusses how digital payments are improving government service delivery and leading to higher take-home pay and improved transparency.

Toward a Cash-Lite Ghana: Building an Inclusive Digital Payments Ecosystem

The Ghana Digital Payments Roadmap is designed to chart the way to a vibrant and inclusive digital payments ecosystem.

Accelerating winds of change in global payments

The COVID-19 crisis is having a significant and widespread effect on global payments across sectors. The most striking and potentially lasting impact is an accelerating pace of change in the industry.

Building inclusive payment ecosystems in Tanzania and Ghana

At the heart of this financial transformation is the rise of digital payments services through which nearly any individual or business can send or receive money in real time for almost any p…

World Development Report 2016: Access to the Internet inadequate

USAID has commissioned this study to understand the perceptions towards digital payments among consumers and merchants in low-income communities. The research provides key findings from quantitative surveys carried out in Indian cities- Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kota, Vishakhapatnam, Guntur and Jaunpur,

State of Maryland: Significant savings and improved convenience with electronic payments

The State of Maryland needed a faster, more reliable and more cost effective way of making unemployment benefit payments to citizens who depended on them.

The State’s original process was…

Developing Inclusive Digital Payment Systems

This report from Centre for Strategic and International Studies makes a strong case for digital payments for equity, development and security.

“Payment and Settlement Systems in India: Vision 2019 – 2021

With an aim to create a cash-lite economy, the Reserve Bank of India has published its “Payments System Vision 2021.” The document can be a useful resource for members like Ghana who are wor…

Lessons from implementing P2G payments strategies

This GSMA study shares lessons from Orange’s work in West and Central Africa on implementing Person-to-Government (P2G) payment strategies.

Using digital tools to grow africulture and financial inclusion in Ethiopia

Ethiopia has a sole mobile network provider and a banking sector that is closed to foreign ownership. Does that make it easy for the government to take a rural-first approach to digitization? Learn about it more in this USAIDFeed The Future brief that also mentions the Alliance.

How to consolidate gains in digital payments

This CG Dev paper, by Professor Njuguna Ndung’u, shows how M-Pesa’s success has led to a series of endogenous innovations that have shaped Kenya’s digital space. It outlines several important challenges that Kenya will need to address in order to further consolidate its success, including connectivity issues, digital ID, interoperability and consumer protection.