President Akufo-Addo pushes for Africa-wide mobile interoperability

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo used his last African Union (AU) Summit to launch a passionate appeal to his colleague heads of state to support the implementation of an Africawide mobile telephony interoperability system.

Addressing the 37th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State of the African Union (AU) yesterday, President Akufo-Addo called for the adoption of the 2024 Africa Prosperity Dialogues (APD 2024) Compact Document and, specifically, the adoption of a continental interoperability network across all member states.

This, he stressed, would give a major boost to Africa’s efforts toward building the world’s largest single market through the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) by allowing millions of Africans to buy and sell goods and services across borders in their local currencies.

In his address to his fellow leaders at the Nelson Mandela Plenary Hall at the AU head office in Addis Ababa, President Akufo-Addo said Africa’s ambition to establish the world’s largest single market under AfCFTA would be enhanced mightily by the continent’s leaders adopting a “collective, aggressive embrace of the digital economy and its available tools.”

He said, “At the end of last month’s three-day Africa Prosperity Dialogues (APD) 2024, which I was happy to host at the Peduase Presidential Lodge in Aburi, Ghana, the participants signed up to the Peduase Compact, a document I am informed has been widely distributed here at this Summit.

“Allow me to focus on one very transformative and, at the same time, very doable item in the Compact, which, if implemented, can truly and meaningfully fast-track the inclusive realisation of the AfCFTA.
This is the introduction of an Africawide mobile telephony interoperability.

“The participants in this year’s Africa Prosperity Dialogues were unanimous in agreeing that enabling interoperability to have a single pan-African payment system is the easiest, quickest and most effective way to accelerate and deepen the single market project in Africa.

It is a low-hanging fruit way of making AfCFTA immediately meaningful to tens of millions of people across Africa,” President Akufo-Addo further stated.

Adding statistics to back his call, President Akufo-Addo indicated that “figures provided at the Dialogues by the AFDB and backed by the GSM Association indicate that almost half of all Africans have a sim card, 28 per cent are accessing the Internet, and we saw a whopping US$832 billion worth of mobile money transactions in sub-Saharan Africa in 2022 alone.”

This $832 billion 2022 figure is estimated to have grown further by at least 30 per cent last year and to grow significantly more, if Africans are allowed to use their mobile money wallets to buy and sell across borders.

“Imagine where this [$832bn] figure will be with a common interoperability system working across all member states.

Imagine for a moment a world where a market trader in Johannesburg can easily and securely send money to her family in Dakar without the need for cumbersome currency exchanges or risky cash transfers,” President Akufo-Addo suggested.

He further charged his colleagues to also imagine “a world where consumers can use their mobile phones to seamlessly purchase goods and services across African borders in their currencies.

This is the world that we can build and we must build now with utmost urgency here in Africa.”

He noted that the technology was available to achieve continental interoperability.