Fintech
Nigeria’s Missing Mobile Banking App
By EMELE ONU and ANTONY SGUAZZIN
PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD KALU
EVERY MONTH, IFEYINWA ABEL, the secretary of a Pentecostal
church in Lagos, spends as much as a quarter of her salary sending
money to pay for diabetes drugs to her mother 430 miles away in
Abia Ohafia, a small agricultural village.
It isn’t easy. First Abel, 35, has to go to a bank branch in
Lagos, the country’s commercial hub, and transfer 6,000 naira
($17) into the account of a friend in Ebem Ohafia, another town in
Abia state. Then she’s got to pay 2,000 naira to 4,000 naira for her
65-year-old mother, Uche Arua, to get on the back of a motorcy-
cle and ride 8 miles from her village to Ebem Ohafia to pick up
the money.
At least that’s what happens if this fragile arrangement
doesn’t break down. Some months, Abel can’t afford the motor-
cycle fare; other times, rains make the dirt road impassable. “Some-
times I am unable to send the money, and she stays without the
drug, and I am pained,” Abel says, shaken and dabbing her eyes
with a handkerchief. “She must get the money and buy her drugs
to survive.”
Abel’s story would be unusual across much of the rest of
sub-Saharan Africa. In a region that accounts for half of the world’s
866 million mobile banking and payment accounts and two-thirds
of all money transferred by phone, Nigeria is a laggard. There are
an estimated 172 million mobile phones in the country, but it didn’t
award a single mobile banking license until July, when it gave one
to South Africa’s MTN Group Ltd. Its foot-dragging—encouraged
by the traditional banking sector, say industry analysts and tele-
communications companies—is blamed for declining financial
inclusion in this country of almost 209 million people.
Nigeria vies with South Africa as the continent’s largest
economy and is its most populous, but it’s a “sleeping giant” in
the world of fintech, according to GSMA, a trade body that
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