Africa Prosperity Network founder Gabby Otchere-Darko is pushing for continent-wide mobile-money interoperability, arguing the technology already exists to let Africans buy and sell across borders using their local wallets, but political will is lagging behind.
Speaking on Joy News’ The Pulse on Monday, Otchere-Darko cited GSMA figures showing mobile-money transactions worldwide totaled about $2.1 trillion in 2025, with roughly $1.43 trillion of that in Africa across some 92 billion transactions. Despite that scale, he said a consumer in one African country still cannot use a mobile-money wallet to pay a seller in another. “You see something being advertised on Instagram, maybe some clothes, and the designer is in Kenya. Can you use a mobile money wallet to buy it? No, you can’t,” he said.
He framed interoperability as a practical shortcut around the stalled push for a single West African currency, describing a system where buyers pay in local currency and sellers receive their own currency’s equivalent as effectively creating “a single currency without a single currency.” Otchere-Darko argued the gap helps explain why intra-African trade sits at about 16 percent of the continent’s total trade, compared with more than 65 percent within the Eurozone, and said closing it could spur demand for transport and logistics services and give manufacturers more reason to build production facilities on the continent rather than lean on imports.
The proposal would require central banks, telecom operators and financial regulators to coordinate across borders, a level of alignment that has proven difficult in past African integration efforts. Otchere-Darko said the topic will feature at the Africa Prosperity Dialogues 2027, set for January under the theme “Borderless Africa We Want: Move Freely, Pay Seamlessly, Trade More.”
