Africa processed $1.4tn in mobile money in 2025, led by East Africa as Southern Africa’s tiny share exposes a striking financial divide
Keypoints:
- Africa moved 66 percent of global mobile money
- East Africa processed $806bn against Southern Africa’s $8bn
- East and West Africa dominate transaction value
AFRICA processed about $1.4tn through mobile-money services in 2025, accounting for roughly two-thirds of transaction value worldwide and confirming that a technology once built to solve basic access problems has become part of the continent’s everyday financial infrastructure.
But the continental headline hides a remarkable divide. East Africa alone moved $806bn, roughly 100 times Southern Africa’s $8bn, while East and West Africa together accounted for more than 90 percent of Africa’s mobile-money transaction value.
The numbers tell a bigger story about African finance. Mobile money has flourished not simply where incomes are highest, but where it solved problems that banks, branches and cards had not solved cheaply or conveniently enough.
Africa sits at the centre
The GSMA’s State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026 says mobile-money services processed about $2.1tn worldwide in 2025, 23 percent more than the previous year.
Africa accounted for about $1.4tn of that total. It also recorded around 92bn transactions, roughly 74 percent of global mobile-money transaction volume, and ended the year with about 1.2bn registered accounts.
Those figures show a financial system embedded in ordinary life.
Across the continent, people use mobile wallets to receive wages, send money home, pay school fees, settle utility bills, buy food and move small sums between family members or businesses.
Africa Briefing has previously reported how digital payments are becoming more important to African firms even as costs, connectivity and cybersecurity continue to slow adoption.
East Africa built an enormous lead
Nowhere is mobile money more deeply established than East Africa.
The region processed $806bn in mobile-money transactions during 2025. It had 537m registered accounts and 193m accounts active within the previous 30 days, making it the continent’s clear centre of gravity.
Kenya best illustrates what happens when a mobile wallet stops feeling like a financial product and becomes part of daily behaviour.
World Bank Global Findex data for Kenya show that 87.5 percent of Kenyan adults aged 15 and above had a mobile-money account in 2024, one of the highest mobile-money account ownership rates in the world.
The dominance of M-Pesa is equally striking. By June 2026, it still accounted for 88.8 percent of Kenya’s mobile-money subscriptions, according to Communications Authority of Kenya data. Airtel Money held 11.1 percent.
M-Pesa’s share has been gradually declining as Airtel gains ground, but the larger point remains. Nearly two decades after its launch, mobile money in Kenya is not a novelty. It is part of how millions of people pay and transfer money.
That depth helps explain why Kenya remains central to Africa’s debate over payment interoperability and financial innovation.
West Africa is becoming harder to ignore
East Africa has the largest market, but West Africa is now too large to be treated as a distant second.
The region processed $498bn in 2025 and had 517m registered accounts. Together, East and West Africa moved about $1.304tn through mobile-money platforms — more than 90 percent of Africa’s total transaction value.
Ghana, Senegal and other West African markets have built increasingly mature mobile-money ecosystems, while Nigeria’s population and fast-changing payments market give the region room for further expansion.
Africa Briefing’s reporting on Ghana’s expanding digital economy has shown how mobile-money interoperability, digital identity and payment infrastructure are increasingly becoming part of ordinary commercial activity.
The rest of the regional picture is far smaller. Central Africa processed about $105bn, North Africa $15bn and Southern Africa only $8bn.
Then there is Southern Africa
The $8bn figure makes Southern Africa the most interesting contrast in the dataset.
East Africa processed about 101 times more mobile-money value in 2025. Yet Southern Africa includes some of the continent’s more developed formal banking markets.
That does not mean the region is digitally backward. In important respects, the opposite helps explain the difference.
South Africa entered the mobile era with a comparatively deep banking system, widespread card use and established payment infrastructure. The World Bank describes South Africa as having a well-developed and deep financial sector. Consumers therefore had more alternatives to telecom-led mobile wallets than people in markets where bank branches were scarce or moving small sums was cumbersome.
Mobile money was transformative in East Africa precisely because it removed friction.
A phone number, an agent network and a simple interface could turn a basic handset into something approaching a bank branch in a pocket. In many communities, mobile money supplied something that had barely existed at scale.
The regional divide therefore says less about technological sophistication than about different histories of financial access.
The $1.4tn needs perspective
There is one important warning about the headline number.
Africa did not generate $1.4tn of new economic output through mobile money. The figure measures transaction value moving through mobile-money systems. The same money can pass through several wallets and businesses during the year.
It should therefore not be compared directly with African GDP.
What the figure does reveal is how intensively the infrastructure is being used.
That infrastructure is also changing. GSMA says merchant payments grew 42 percent globally in 2025 to $155bn, making them the fastest-growing mobile-money use case. Bank-to-mobile transfers reached $167bn and mobile-to-bank transfers $163bn.
Those flows show mobile wallets becoming bridges into the wider financial system rather than isolated substitutes for bank accounts.
Africa Briefing has previously examined how Africa’s fintech ecosystem is moving towards more connected financial infrastructure. Mobile money is increasingly the foundation beneath that shift.
Africa changed the banking question
For years, financial inclusion was framed around a simple question: how could more Africans be brought into banks?
Mobile money changed the question.
Across much of the continent, people did not wait for enough branches to be built. Financial services travelled instead to devices already in their hands and to agent networks operating in neighbourhoods, markets and villages.
The result is a continent that now moves about two-thirds of the world’s mobile-money transaction value.
Yet the gap between East Africa’s $806bn and Southern Africa’s $8bn is a reminder that there is no single African digital-finance story. Banking history, regulation, competition and consumer habits have produced very different outcomes.
What Africa has demonstrated is that innovation does not always flow from the richest market to the poorest.
Sometimes the places with the biggest gaps have the strongest reason to build something new.
Mobile money is one of those cases.
Africa did not simply catch up with the rest of the world. It built a financial habit at a scale the rest of the world is still trying to understand.