Mobile Money Has Won. Now Comes the Harder Work.

By ADRI Research Institute

The adoption story of mobile money in East Africa is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable financial inclusion success stories of the last two decades. Uganda alone has tens of millions of registered mobile money accounts. The infrastructure for digital financial transactions now reaches communities that formal banking never did and, in all honesty, never intended to.

The debate about whether mobile money works is over. It works.

The debate that now needs to happen — and that research must drive — is whether it is working for the people who need it most, and what it will take to deepen its impact beyond the transaction layer.

The Registration Trap

Mobile money's headline numbers are impressive. Active user numbers are considerably less so.

Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between registered accounts and regularly active accounts remains stubbornly wide. Millions of people have been onboarded to mobile money platforms — often through aggressive acquisition campaigns — and then proceed to use them primarily for one thing: receiving remittances and immediately withdrawing cash.

This is not financial inclusion in any meaningful sense. It is digitised cash. The transaction is electronic; the financial behaviour is unchanged.

Understanding why active usage remains shallow requires research that goes beyond platform transaction data. It requires asking people directly: what do you use mobile money for, what would you use it for if it worked differently, and what is stopping you from using it more?

The answers are rarely about technology. They are about trust, about product design, about agent network reliability, about the fact that the nearest agent is out of float three days a week.

The Merchant Problem

Merchant payment adoption is where the next significant battle for mobile money utility is being fought — and where the evidence base is weakest.

Consumer peer-to-peer transfers have robust data and a long research history. Merchant payments — the use of mobile money to pay for goods and services at the point of sale — are far less well understood, despite being central to every major mobile money operator's growth strategy.

What drives a small business owner to accept mobile money payments? What are the actual barriers — cost, complexity, customer demand, float management, reconciliation burden? How do merchant economics vary across sectors, across urban and rural settings, across business sizes?

These are not abstract questions. They are the questions that determine whether mobile money becomes embedded in everyday commerce or remains a tool for moving cash between people rather than paying for things.

Research that maps the merchant experience — not just the consumer experience — is essential to answering them.

Who Is Still Being Left Behind

Financial inclusion data has a well-documented optimism bias. Surveys tend to reach people who are reachable — which systematically underrepresents the most excluded.

Women in rural areas remain disproportionately likely to lack mobile money access, even in markets with high aggregate penetration. The barriers are compounded: lower mobile phone ownership, lower digital literacy, social norms that restrict independent financial decision-making, and identity documentation requirements that exclude those without formal ID.

Persons with disabilities face access barriers that are almost entirely invisible in financial inclusion research — from the physical design of USSD interfaces to the inaccessibility of agent locations.

Elderly populations are routinely onboarded by family members and then lack the confidence or knowledge to use accounts independently.

Measuring inclusion accurately means designing research that deliberately reaches these populations — not treating their absence from the data as evidence of their absence from the potential market.

What Good Financial Inclusion Research Looks Like

The mobile money sector is data-rich in some areas and data-poor in others. Operators have detailed transaction data. They rarely have good data on why people do not transact, what experiences drive account dormancy, or how financial behaviour changes — or does not change — as a result of mobile money access.

Bridging this gap requires:

Mixed-methods research that combines transaction data with primary qualitative insight. Numbers show what is happening. Conversations explain why. Both are necessary.

Research designs that deliberately oversample excluded populations. Representative national samples will always underrepresent the most marginalised. Intentional sampling strategies are needed to make them visible.

Longitudinal approaches that track behaviour over time. Financial inclusion is not a binary state — it is a trajectory. One-time surveys miss the dynamics of adoption, lapse, and re-engagement that operators and policymakers most need to understand.

Independence. Research commissioned by operators and reported through operator channels has a credibility problem. Independent research — conducted by organisations with no stake in the findings — produces evidence that the sector, regulators, and development community can actually use.

The Next Chapter

Mobile money has demonstrated that digital finance can reach people that traditional banking never could. That is a genuine achievement and it deserves genuine recognition.

But the work is not finished — and in many ways, the most important work is just beginning. Moving from access to active use, from transactions to financial resilience, from individual wallets to merchant ecosystems — these are the challenges that the next decade of mobile money research needs to address.

The infrastructure exists. The question now is whether the evidence base will keep pace.