The African Development Bank and its partners recently launched the Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI). The much touted project is designed to aid safety and expansion of digital financial transactions in Africa.The Fund is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Agence Française de Dévelopement (AFD) and the Government of Luxembourg, as initial contributors.
The goal of the project is to ensure that at least 320 million more Africans, of which nearly 60% are women, have access to digital financial services. The fund will deploy US$100 million in grants and US $300 million in the form of debt from the Bank’s ordinary capital resources by 2030, to scale up electronic financial services for low-income communities. The ADFI’s interventions will be mainly in four areas; infrastructure, including digital and interoperable payment systems; digital products and innovation; policy and regulatory reform and harmonization; and capacity building. It will help to close the transaction gender gap between men and women. ADFI’s opening project, which serves as a pilot for the facility, is a $11.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Bank and the Central Bank of West African States. The grant will create an interoperable digital payment system that will allow consumers to send and receive money between mobile wallets, and from these wallets to other digital and bank accounts.
