Africa has more live instant-payment systems than any other developing region — and most were built with inclusion, not just speed, as the goal. AfricaNenda’s SIIPS report is the continental scorecard. Here is the landscape, and what separates a fast rail from an inclusive one.
Real-time retail rails are everywhere on the continent. The harder question SIIPS asks is whether they actually reach everyone.
An instant payment system (IPS) clears and makes funds available to the recipient in seconds, around the clock. Across Africa these have proliferated faster than almost anywhere — national rails like Nigeria’s NIP, South Africa’s PayShap, Ghana’s GhIPSS Instant Pay, Kenya’s PesaLink, Egypt’s InstaPay and many more — because they leapfrog a sparse card and branch footprint.
The continental benchmark is the State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems (SIIPS) report, published annually by the AfricaNenda Foundation with the World Bank and UNECA. The framing word is inclusive: a rail that is fast but only reachable by bank-app-holding urban customers is not, in AfricaNenda’s terms, inclusive.
SIIPS tracks how many systems are live, how much they move, and — crucially — how inclusive each is on its Inclusivity Spectrum, scoring functionality, access for low-income and informal users, and governance. The SIIPS 2025 edition reported roughly 36 live systems across 31 countries, collectively processing around 64 billion transactions worth nearly USD 2 trillion in 2024, with volumes growing about 35% a year since 2020.
Speed is table stakes. SIIPS rates whether a rail supports low-value transactions, multiple channels (incl. USSD and mobile money), and pricing the informal economy can bear.
In SIIPS 2025, Nigeria’s NIP became the first African IPS rated “Mature” on the Inclusivity Spectrum — a milestone the rest of the continent is measured against.
An inclusive rail reaches feature phones and agents, not just smartphones. USSD and mobile-money interoperability matter more than UX gloss for reach.
Domestic instant rails are maturing; linking them across borders (via PAPSS, TCIB and bilateral integrations) is where the 2025–26 effort is concentrated.
If it only works inside bank apps, charges per-transaction fees the informal sector cannot absorb, or ignores USSD, it leaves out exactly the people instant payments are meant to bank.
Rails that do not interconnect mobile money and banks fragment the market and re-create the closed loops they were meant to dissolve. Mandated interoperability (Ghana, Tanzania) is what moves the needle.
Government-to-person payments — wages, grants, subsidies — onto an instant rail bring the unbanked in at scale. SIIPS 2025 highlights this as a key scalability lever.
Open above; the build-and-land judgement is for members.
Design for the SIIPS inclusion criteria from the start: support USSD and agent cash-in/out, keep low-value transactions economic, and interoperate with mobile money. The trap is building a smartphone-first rail, declaring victory on volume, and discovering you have only banked the already-banked.
Use SIIPS as a due-diligence map — it tells you which national rails are live, mature and genuinely reachable versus nominal. A “Mature” rail (NIP) is a different integration risk from an early-stage one. Match your product’s channel mix to the rail’s real reach, not its press release.
Over-indexing on transaction volume hides exclusion. A rail can post huge numbers while the bottom half of the market still transacts in cash — and that gap is the actual addressable opportunity.