Writing

What I Want African Payment Infrastructure to Look Like in Five Years

A practical ambition: understandable services, useful records and a clear route to resolving problems.

Garang Mayom Malek · Published 24 September 2026 · Updated 24 September 2026 · 2 minute read

In five years, I want the quality of a payment service to be judged by how confidently a person can use it. That includes making a payment, understanding the result and getting help when the result needs attention.

The ambition is easy to describe in everyday terms. A person should know what they are paying for. An institution should be able to explain what happened to a transaction. The record should make the next step clear.

Services that people can understand

Clear instructions should be a core part of the product. The user needs the relevant amount, reference, timing and contact route in language they can act on. A status should explain what is happening and what the person needs to do.

For a service used across languages and contexts, that takes careful writing and testing. Translating a confusing instruction preserves the confusion. The starting point is a task that has been explained well.

Records that connect the journey

A payment often relates to something else: a member account, an invoice, a service or a consignment. The record becomes more useful when the people responsible can connect those parts without asking the user to reconstruct the history.

That ambition also calls for care over access. People should receive the information needed for their role, with clear accountability for changes. The purpose is an understandable service with a traceable history.

Support that can resolve the difficult cases

The experience of an exception reveals a great deal about the design. A user needs a reliable contact route, a way to identify the case and an answer about what happens next.

I want support to be treated as part of the service itself. The information a team needs to investigate an issue should be considered during design. Recurring problems should feed back into improvements to the process.

Progress people can inspect

Useful reporting should connect an outcome to a defined period and method. A measure becomes valuable when the reader understands what was counted and what the result means.

For the projects described on this site, the ambition is to build that record gradually: source-linked descriptions, dated milestones and implementation updates that explain what users can do. Longer-term results should grow from those documented steps.

The next five years should make essential financial tasks easier to understand and more dependable to complete. That is a practical standard for technology, partnerships and leadership alike.

Filed under Partnerships, Trade and customs.