The Bridge 400 Million Africans Are Still Waiting For
400 million Africans have a phone, sometimes a job, sometimes a business, and no bridge to the formal financial system. Equity Group just put one man in charge of building it.
Dr. James Mwangi becomes the continent’s first Digital Public Infrastructure Champion.
Equity Group Holdings, the AfricaNenda Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced in Nairobi that Dr James Mwangi, Equity’s Group CEO, will serve as Africa’s first Continental Digital Public Infrastructure Champion. The mandate: push interoperable payment systems across 20 to 30 African markets, working alongside more than 30 central banks already engaged on the design. It starts in Rwanda, then the Democratic Republic of Congo, before widening further.
“Equity has transformed banking and financial inclusion for millions of Africans. Yet nearly 400 million people across the continent remain excluded from formal financial services.”
Dr Robert Ochola, CEO, AfricaNenda.
The bridge has a business case
Equity itself is the proof that the bridge pays. The bank counts 22.7 million customers, 86,910 agency outlets and 1.4 million merchants across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan and the DRC, and is now chasing a 2030 target of 100 million customers across 15 countries, an expansion already eyeing Zambia, Mozambique and Angola along the same Lobito corridor now pulling copper out of the Congo.
Every one of those agents and merchants is a plank in a bridge Equity built for itself first. Mwangi is now being asked to build the public version, open to every bank, fintech and merchant that is not Equity too.
A bank built its own bridge first. Now it has been asked to build the public one.
“Championing Africa’s economic transformation has always been our purpose. Digital Public Infrastructure provides the foundation for the next phase of that transformation.”
Dr James Mwangi, Group CEO, Equity Group.
“At the Gates Foundation, we believe building Digital Public Infrastructure is only a first step. The real measure of success is whether people use it to improve their lives.”
Nanjira Sambuli, Gates Foundation.
This is not another payment app competing for a merchant’s attention. It is the plumbing underneath every app, the pipe that lets a Rwandan merchant get paid instantly by a Congolese customer without either of them routing through a bank they do not already trust. Africa’s remittance costs average 7.8%, the most expensive region in the world to move money across a border that is sometimes only a few kilometres wide. That cost is not a bank fee, it is the price of a missing bridge.
Who gets to build on top of it once it exists
The middlemen charging that 7.8% today are charging it precisely because there has been no cheap public alternative.
An interoperable rail removes that toll booth, and every fintech, merchant platform and trade financier that plugs into a shared rail stops needing to build its own compliance and settlement stack from scratch. The gap this opens is not the rail itself, Equity and its partners are building that. It is everything that gets built once the rail is live: merchant tooling for the 1.4 million merchants Equity already touches, credit scoring off transaction data that previously never left an informal ledger, cross-border trade finance for the trader currently absorbing the 7.8% out of their own margin.
A champion was just named for the bridge. The businesses waiting on the other side of it have not been named yet.
The Business Week Afrika Summit on October 1 and 2 is built for exactly that gap, the builders who want to be first onto a rail the moment it opens in their market, not the ones still discovering it exists a year later.
Secure your seat and join the builders shaping what gets built next: https://apps.little.africa/events/105
400 million people already have a phone in their hand. What Mwangi has been asked to build is not a new app for that phone. It is the bridge that finally lets it reach a bank.