H.E. Wamkele Mene

In November 2021, the Smart Africa Board approved the Blueprint for e-Payments for the Facilitation of Digital Trade across Africa, whose blueprint’s vision is to enable “an interoperable, safe, affordable, universally accessible, inclusive and responsible African cross-border e-payments ecosystem to increase trade across the continent.” The board charged the secretariat to ensure swift action to advance the single digital market. Cross-border trade by small traders at land borders, dominated by women and youth, is vital to the One African Market. Although individual transactions are small, volumes add up to sizeable amounts that sometimes exceed official customs-recorded trade across entire categories of goods, particularly agriculture. To achieve the vision of the e-Payments blueprint, our goal with this project is to ascertain the cross-border payments experience of small traders at the borders and determine ways to provide opportunities for traders and producers to formalize their business operations to harness the economic potential of Africa’s informal trade.  Robust, reliable, accessible, and convenient payments are a vital foundation to ease doing business and formalizing trade at land borders. In October 2022, the Extra-Ordinary Smart Africa Steering Committee of Ministers of ICT passed a resolution for the Secretariat to implement a PoC for cross-border merchant payments for MSMEs at African land borders.  The Committee also agreed to advocate for the removal/revision of FX restrictions that prohibit small traders' adoption and usage of digital payments.   As the continent focuses on collectively accelerating the Implementation of the AfCFTA, this roundtable will:  Spotlight the lived payments experience today by traders at land borders Address removal of barriers identified during border visits prohibit the adoption and usage of digital payments at land borders. What is needed from   Determine when interoperable business-to-business payments can be made available by payments services providers