Investing in Mojaloop: Accelerating the adoption of an open-source instant payment solutions in Africa
By Robert Karanja
Co-Develop is excited to announce a new investment in Mojaloop Foundation (Mojaloop), an innovative catalyst designed to empower organizations to create interoperable payment systems that enable inclusive digital financial services. Mojaloop is an open-source software that can be used to build interoperable, digital payment systems connecting users, banks, government entities, and other financial service providers in order to accelerate instant payment system adoption.
Co-Develop is supporting Mojaloop’s go-to-market strategy to make it easier for countries to adopt the open source payment switch, take ownership and agency over their critical infrastructure, and ultimately drive greater financial inclusion.
Mojaloop’s top priority in recent years has been to increase the number of Mojaloop deployments to accelerate Africa’s pace of financial inclusion. In aid of this, Mojaloop is currently in active engagements with 13 national payments systems projects across the continent. The go-to-market strategy is designed to strengthen the number of resources to accelerate the deployment cycle and increase focus on the up-front stakeholder engagement and planning aspects of deploying an instant payment system. This means reducing the barriers to gaining traction and implementing a successful proof of concept that commences with the appropriate planning for a full deployment.
“We are committed to ensuring the deployment of safe and inclusive digital public infrastructure and this investment goes a long way in doing that by facilitating payments. This will have the catalytic impact of empowering communities and ultimately countries as we work towards digital transformation in Africa”, said Robert Karanja, Senior Director for Africa at Co-Develop.
“Financial inclusion is a key enabler of Africa’s development and has the potential to transition millions of households out of poverty. Co-Develop’s investment, among other key Mojaloop initiatives that are a part of Digital Public Infrastructure thinking, can catapult financial inclusion within developing economies”, said Mojaloop Foundation Executive Director Paula Hunter. “Ultimately, our focus is on live deployments and to offer flexibility in the activities required to achieve this goal.”