Ghana urged African Heads of State to support the implementation of an African-wide mobile telephony interoperability system which the country believed would boost the continent’s efforts at building the world’s largest market via the implementation of the African Continent Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agenda.
The country’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said this this Sunday, July 21 as the African Union (AU) Sixth Mid-Year Coordination Meeting was being held in Accra.
The president, according to Accra-based local media - Graphic Online, was also expected to lobby African leaders in pursuit of scaling up mobile money interoperability for economic growth.
Ghana is currently making inroads with the introduction of mobile interoperability into the financial space, facilitating the transaction of funds from a phone to a bank account and vice-versa.
The financial digitalization system, which also allows direct and seamless transfer of funds from one mobile money wallet to another across networks, is the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.
It has significantly lowered the cost on transactions, while increasing financial service reach to engender financial inclusion, says the authorities.
“Almost half of Africans have a SIM card, 28 per cent are accessing the internet, and a whooping USD832 billion worth of mobile money transactions was recorded in sub-Saharan Africa in 2022 alone,” President Nana Akufo-Addo noted while addressing the recent Africa Prosperity Dialogue (APD).
The creation of AUFIs is one of the flagship projects of Agenda 2063, aiming at accelerating integration and socio-economic development of the continent.
The agreed timeframes in the first ten-year plan of the Agenda were for the African Investment Bank and Pan-African Stock Exchange to be established by 2016, the African Monetary Fund by 2018, and the African Central Bank and Single African Currency by 2034.
As the Champion of AU’s Financial Institutions, President Nana Akufo-Addo believes, achieving the continent’s objectives of financial independence ought to be at the center of the agenda for continental integration.