Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has proposed that the African continent moves from a policy shift in the adoption of a single currency among African countries.
He, however, suggests interconnected payment platforms, including interoperable mobile money services, as a better alternative for bridging the financial divide and boosting intra-African trade.
According to the Vice President, the continent-wide digital payment system will improve intra-African trade if successfully adopted.
He insists it will also promote financial inclusion and formalize businesses on the continent.
Dr. Bawumia, who was addressing the African Prosperity Networking (APN) event in Accra on July 5, argued that this innovation could, in the meantime, substitute Africa’s pursuit of a common currency.
The event theme was “Scaling Up Interoperability: Using Mobile Money to Buy and Sell Across Africa.”
“When we think about scaling up mobile money interoperability to the entire continent, I believe that doing so will get at the benefits of a payment system without necessarily having a common currency. That idea of a common currency which came in 1963 has really been overtaken by the digital payments age that today, you can think about mobile money as a common currency if we make it interoperable,” the Vice President said.
“I believe that If we are serious about it, we can work towards mobile money Interoperability at the continental stage and, therefore, we should move away in this regard from the macro-economic convergence criteria to digital payment convergence criteria,” the Vice President added.
Executive Chairman and Founder of the APN, Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, underscored the need for mobile money interoperability at the continental level to improve intra-continental trade.
“For a continent, where a majority of our people and their daily wage through micro small and medium scale enterprises, what is absolutely undeniably clear to us is that the future of Africa has been more and more defined by the freedom of inclusion, the abundance of opportunities and the ladder to prosperity, which digital economy provides,” he added.
The Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr Ernest Addison, acknowledged that a harmonized regulatory framework and partnerships among digital players remain pivotal to achieving broad financial sector inclusion and inter-trade in Africa.