In South Kivu, when M23 fighters seized Goma in early 2025, the banks closed. The ATMs went dark. The physical financial infrastructure that the formal economy depends on vanished almost overnight. What didn't vanish was mobile money. Vodacom, Airtel, Orange, and Africell continued operating their networks — not because they were immune to the conflict, but because their infrastructure was distributed enough to function even as the state's was not. By end-2024, the DRC had 29 million active mobile money users, up 14% in a single quarter. In a country of 103 million people where fewer than 0.2 commercial bank branches exist per 1,000 square kilometres, and where formal financial account ownership stood at 3% in 2011, that number represents the most consequential financial infrastructure shift in the country's post-independence history. The deeper shift is not in the numbers. It is in what the numbers reveal about where functional sovereignty now resides.
What the SIM card replaced
In large parts of the DRC and in Chad's remote northern and eastern regions, the state apparatus is present on paper and largely absent on the ground. UNICEF estimates birth registration rates at roughly 25% in the DRC and 15% in Chad — meaning the majority of citizens in these countries do not exist in any government database. Without a birth certificate, there is no national ID. Without a national ID, there is no bank account, no formal employment contract, no legal identity in the conventional sense.
What exists instead is a SIM card. A mobile wallet registered at a roadside kiosk — with a phone number as the identifier — functions as a de facto financial identity. The transaction history it generates substitutes for the credit record a bank would require. The peer-to-peer transfers it processes substitute for the wire transfers a commercial bank would handle. In the DRC, formal account ownership rose from 3% in 2011 to 39% by 2025 — driven almost entirely by mobile money, not by the expansion of traditional banking. The DRC's 2023-2028 National Financial Inclusion Strategy, developed with the Central Bank of Congo, explicitly targets raising this to 65% by 2028. The state is not building that inclusion itself. It is coordinating around the infrastructure that Vodacom, Airtel, Orange, and Africell already built. In Chad, the trajectory is similar but more nascent. Orange Money and Airtel Money dominate the market. In 2025, authorities licensed Konoom — the country's first fully local mobile money company — marking the first time a domestic institution, rather than a foreign telecom multinational, entered the space. Konoom processes mobile transfers, tax payments, public service fees, and merchant payments. The state is becoming a client of the payment infrastructure, not its operator.
The government payroll problem
The state's dependence on private telecom infrastructure is not theoretical — it is operational and monthly. In both the DRC and Chad, central governments lack the physical infrastructure to distribute salaries to civil servants stationed in remote provinces without mobile money. A teacher in South Kivu or a police officer in northern Chad does not receive a salary through a government payroll convoy. They receive an SMS from Airtel or Orange. The system has measurably reduced the phenomenon of "ghost workers" — employees who existed only on paper — because digital disbursement requires a verifiable phone number attached to a real SIM. But it has also transferred significant operational leverage to private corporations whose commercial interests may not align with government priorities and whose networks, in the event of technical failure or regulatory dispute, can leave entire provincial administrations without a functioning pay mechanism. The DRC's experience in M23-controlled territories illustrates the flip side. When the formal banking system collapsed in Goma, humanitarian organizations that had previously relied on bank partners for cash transfers were forced to pivot to mobile money operators — turning Vodacom and Airtel into the primary financial infrastructure for both civilian aid delivery and, as UN Panel of Experts reports document, the financial logistics of the conflict itself.
The revenue stream nobody talks about
The most uncomfortable dimension of mobile money's expansion in Central Africa is the one that appears in UN Expert reports rather than fintech investment decks. In contested territories in eastern DRC, mobile money agents operate as logistical nodes for armed groups. M23 and affiliated factions collect taxes and protection fees from artisanal miners at Rubaya — the UN assessed in 2024 that the group was extracting at least $800,000 monthly from coltan levies alone — with payments flowing through mobile wallets and cash-out agents rather than physical cash handovers. A transfer of $50 through Airtel Money looks identical whether it is paying a fighter's stipend or a family member's school fees. Rural mobile money agents operate with minimal regulatory oversight, making these transaction flows exceptionally difficult to monitor or interrupt. The LSE Africa blog documented in June 2025 how mobile money is reshaping political patronage networks across the continent — a dynamic with specific implications in Central Africa, where the line between taxation, extortion, and political finance has always been blurred. The infrastructure that BEAC this week integrated into the PAPSS continental payment network is the same infrastructure through which armed groups in eastern DRC coordinate their financial logistics. Both things are simultaneously true, and acknowledging both is a precondition for thinking clearly about digital financial governance in the region.
The sovereignty paradox
There is a dimension to this that most fintech investment analyses leave unexamined: the telecom companies on which Central African states now functionally depend are themselves controlled from abroad. Vodacom is South African. Orange is French. Airtel is Indian. MTN is South African. The servers on which the transaction data of 29 million Congolese mobile money users resides are not in Kinshasa. The algorithms that determine creditworthiness for microloans are not written by the Central Bank of Congo. The regulatory frameworks that govern data retention, user privacy, and transaction monitoring are applied unevenly across jurisdictions that these corporations span. Governments retain a nuclear option: they can order network shutdowns, as the DRC has done repeatedly during periods of civil unrest. But the shutdown of a mobile money network is not a neutral tool — it is a measure that simultaneously disrupts rebel financial logistics and civilian economic life, government payroll disbursements, and humanitarian aid transfers. The state's ability to control the network is also, in a very direct sense, the state's ability to harm itself.
What has happened in Central Africa over the past decade is not just financial inclusion. It is a transfer of functional sovereignty — over financial identity, over salary distribution, over transaction monitoring — to private multinational corporations that were not elected, cannot be voted out, and whose primary obligation is to their shareholders rather than to the citizens of the countries whose daily economic lives they now manage. That is not an argument against mobile money. It is an argument for understanding precisely what it is.
