In October 2021, Kenya’s High Court ruled that the government had acted unlawfully in rolling out Huduma Namba, its flagship digital identity programme. The state had collected personal and biometric data from millions of citizens without first conducting a data…
In April 2020, Togo had no functioning social registry and a population suddenly cut off from daily income by pandemic restrictions. Within weeks, the government launched Novissi, a cash transfer programme delivered entirely by mobile money. Eligibility was first determined…
When Stripe bought Nigeria’s Paystack in 2020 for a reported $200 million, the headlines focused on the founders and their investors. Less attention went to the infrastructure underneath. Paystack’s product worked because Nigeria already had a national instant payment switch,…
In a Nairobi informal settlement, a mother no longer loses a morning to a school bursar’s queue. She opens her phone, authenticates with a national ID, and pays fees in seconds. In Kigali, a learner’s exam result arrives as a…
The phrase “digital public infrastructure” used to live in conference halls.In 2026 it has started to look like a work plan. In late June, the United Nations Development Programme launched the Africa Accelerator for Digital Public Infrastructure in New York…
For most of independent Africa, information lived in rooms. Births sat in ledgers. Land sat in dusty files. A hospital record travelled only as far as a clerk could carry it. A trader crossing from Kigali to Kampala carried photocopies…
For years, Africa’s digital transformation story has read like a collection of brilliant but disconnected chapters. One country builds a national ID system. Another launches a payments rail. A third pilots a data-exchange gateway. Each is a genuine win, yet…
For decades, a business in Accra paying a supplier in Lagos had to route the transaction through a bank in London or New York, converting cedis to dollars and dollars back to naira along the way. That detour added cost,…
Africa already runs one of the most advanced mobile payment ecosystems in the world. What it hasn’t fully built yet is the infrastructure layer underneath that ecosystem — the identity systems, data-sharing rules, and interoperable rails that determine whether fintech…
Government offices across Africa are running on a different kind of infrastructure than they were five years ago. Digital identity systems, data exchange gateways, and instant payment rails are replacing paper trails and long queues, and 2026 is shaping up…
