Building Inclusive Payment Ecosystems in Tanzania and Ghana

While this analysis could have highlighted the experiences of any number of countries that have succeeded in developing inclusive payment ecosystems, the Tanzanian and Ghanaian experiences hold unique and complementary lessons.

Tanzania has experienced explosive growth in the use of mobile money since the service was first introduced in 2008. With several providers competing for market share, a range of new use cases have been introduced, including digital credit, savings, bill payments, and more. In 2017, nearly a decade after the first mobile money deployment launched, 60 percent of Tanzanians had used mobile money in the past 12 months (FSDT 2017).

Ghana. The use of mobile money did not have much uptake in Ghana in the early years of the first deployments. But after revising its approach to regulation and passing E-Money Issuer Guidelines in 2015, the country saw dramatic growth in the adoption of DFS. Even before the new regulations were adopted, mobile money had already contributed to a 41 percent increase in financial inclusion (InterMedia 2015). Since then, the Bank of Ghana reports that the number of active mobile money accounts has doubled, and use of these services continues to rise even as new players and products are entering the market.

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