By 2022, Mobile money is estimated to have contributed $600bn to GDP in the last one decade.
According to a recently released report by GSMA titled ,‘State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2024, between 2013 and 2022, the total gross domestic product (GDP) in countries with a mobile money service was $600 billion higher than it would have been without mobile money.
This is the equivalent of mobile money increasing GDP by around 1.5% over the same period.
Beyond contributing to financial and digital inclusion, increasing mobile money use has led to higher GDP – particularly among countries in East and West Africa, the report found
The report is widely viewed as the industry’s definitive source of data on digital finance with unparalleled insights from exclusive supply-side data.
Mobile money adoption and active use, it notes, continued to grow but at a slower rate than in previous years. Registered accounts grew to 1.75 billion in 2023, a 12% year-on-year increase.
However, this is a lower annual growth rate than the 15% seen in 2022 and 19% seen in 2021.
At the same time, accounts active on a monthly basis also grew at a slow year-on-year rate. By the end of 2023, there were around 435 million active mobile money accounts – a 9% annual rise, compared to 13% in 2022 and 15% in 2021.
During this period, agent networks continued to grow, driven by increased agents in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Thus, it notes that compared to 2022, registered agents grew by 22% in 2023 to reach 18.6 million, while active agents grew by 14% to 8.3 million.
The findings highlight that these agents were responsible for digitising more than two thirds of all the money entering the mobile money ecosystem: $307 billion in 2023, 12% higher than the previous year.
In all this, these findings show that West Africa stood out in mobile money penetration.
“Over the past few years, West Africa has emerged as mobile money’s new powerhouse. In 2023, over a third of new registered and active 30-day accounts globally were from West Africa.”it states
This was more than any other region with Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal the main drivers of growth.
During the same period, West Africa’s vibrant mobile money ecosystem has developed differently from East Africa.
“ For instance, West Africa has seen more non-mobile-network-operator (MNO)-led mobile money services emerge to compete with MNO led providers.”it says
Director General of GSMA Mats Granryd for over two decades mobile money services have grown exponentially, driving financial inclusion for billions of people, opening up incredible opportunities for entrepreneurs and small businesses across the world.
He noted that use cases are also evolving as mobile money users shift away from basic transactions to more varied services.
“International remittances are now one of the fastest growing use cases of mobile money, while merchant payments expanded by 14% to almost $74 billion in 2023.”, he noted
In the meantime, average revenue per user also increased by 40% between September 2022 and June 2023, despite slowing account and transaction growth rates.
This clearly demonstrates the commercial potential of mobile financial services since today, 1.75 billion registered accounts are processing $1.4 trillion a year, or about $2.7 million a minute.
Orton Kiishweko is an African based journalist who has previously worked at The Citizen and Daily News in EastAfrica.He has produced reporting for other publications such as IPS Africa, Forbes Africa, New York Times , Guardian UK and Diplomat EastAfrica.He also worked as an independent ESG specialist on Africa and at an urban upgrading WorldBank project.Prior to that, he worked at Juntos Global, a Silicon Valley based firm where he led user-design innovation in the region, whilst scaling to serve financial institutions in Tanzania,Uganda,Zambia and Rwanda