Africa’s Financial Inclusion Gap: Mobile Money Expands Access but Gaps Persist

By Des H Rikhotso

For decades, the story of African banking was one of absence: no branches, no ATMs, no paper trail. Today, a subtler and more revealing story is unfolding – one of unevenness.

The World Bank’s newly released 2024 Global Findex Database, which measures how many adults hold a bank account or use mobile money, shows that a majority of African economies have crossed a meaningful threshold of financial inclusion. Yet the gap between the leaders and the laggards has rarely looked so stark.

The Kenya Blueprint

Kenya sits at the top of the table, with 90.1 percent of adults aged 15 and older reporting an account at a bank or through a mobile money service. Mauritius follows closely at 89.6 percent.

Neither result is an accident. Kenya’s figure is the dividend of a policy bet made nearly two decades ago, when regulators allowed telecom operators to build mobile money infrastructure – M-Pesa chief among them – well before most Western regulators would have dared. The wager paid off: a farmer in rural Turkana can now send, receive, and save money with nothing more than a basic handset and a SIM card. Mauritius, meanwhile, built its lead the more conventional way, through a mature banking sector and high per-capita income.

Ghana (81.2 percent) and South Africa (81.1 percent) round out the next tier, both buoyed by a mix of formal banking penetration and expanding digital payment rails. Senegal (76.5 percent), Namibia (72.9 percent), Uganda (72.8 percent), and Zambia (72.7 percent) show that middle-income and even lower-middle-income economies can post strong results when mobile money is allowed to do the work traditional banks cannot.

The Laggards Tell a Different Story

Then there is Nigeria. Africa’s largest economy by GDP and its most populous nation ranks a modest 11th, with just 63.3 percent of adults holding an account – despite a fintech sector that has produced some of the continent’s most celebrated startups and unicorns. The disconnect is instructive: venture capital headlines and inclusion statistics do not always move in tandem. Naira volatility, distrust in formal institutions after past banking-sector shocks, and uneven mobile money regulation have all likely blunted what should be a natural fintech advantage.

Tanzania, at 59.8 percent, misses the 60 percent mark by a hair, a reminder of how much progress can hinge on the last stretch of infrastructure and trust-building rather than the first. Cameroon (60.9 percent), Botswana (61.4 percent), and Lesotho (61.6 percent) cluster just above it, evidence that crossing the 60 percent line is less a triumph than a waypoint.

What the Silence Says

Perhaps the most striking figure in the Findex release is not a percentage at all. Fourteen African countries – including Rwanda, Angola, and Sudan – are simply missing from this year’s analysis, their data unavailable. In a dataset built to measure inclusion, the absence of entire nations is its own kind of exclusion.

Some of these gaps reflect genuine statistical limitations; others, particularly in conflict-affected states like Sudan, reflect the collapse of the very institutions the survey seeks to measure. Either way, policymakers and investors are left making decisions about a fifth of the continent’s economies with no reliable baseline at all.

The Real Divide Isn’t Geography. It’s Design.

The lesson of the 2024 Findex data is not that some African countries are simply richer, and therefore more “banked,” than others. Mauritius aside, wealth explains surprisingly little of the variation.

What separates Kenya from Nigeria, or Ghana from Tanzania, is regulatory design: whether mobile money providers were empowered early and given room to scale, whether trust in financial institutions was actively cultivated rather than assumed, and whether inclusion was treated as infrastructure policy rather than an afterthought to GDP growth.

For a continent where more than half of the global population without a bank account still lives, that distinction is not academic. It is the difference between a farmer who can save for a bad season and one who cannot, between a small trader who can access credit and one locked out of it entirely. The Findex numbers are, in the end, a report card not on African economies but on African policy choices – and this year’s results suggest some governments studied far harder than others.

Des H Rikhotso is a seasoned C-Suite Multi-Industry (Automotive – OEM + Retail, Logistics, Oil & Gas, etc) business executive with 25+ years of Business Leadership Experience across the South, East and Western Sub-Sahara Africa Region. Based in Kampala, Uganda he serves as East Africa Region Country Director and Business Executive, driving Business Strategic Growth and Operational Excellence – contributing his Business Leadership Experience to the Region. Des has held Business Leadership roles at BMW Group Africa, Volkswagen Group Africa, Peugeot Motors South Africa, Toyota/Lexus South Africa, Lexus East Rand (Unitrans/CFAO), Nissan Group of Africa, G.U.D Holdings (Africa Exports Operations Division),The HDR Group of Companies and The Ezra Group of Companies (a Leading Uganda & East Africa Conglomerate). He holds Under-Graduate and Post-Graduate business degrees from the University of the Western Cape, Wits University (Wits Business School) and the University of South Africa.