By Majeed Ayinde, Payment Specialist – IIDiA
The Gambia’s Inclusive and Instant Payment System story began like many across Africa: with ambition, investment, and promise. In 2024, the country set out to build a national switch that would solve a problem familiar to millions: a vendor who accepts one mobile money service but not yours. A parent trying to send school fees across incompatible payment platforms. Small businesses forced to juggle multiple wallets just to serve their customers and pay expensive fees for bilateral bank-to-wallet transactions just to have access to funds.
The government then committed to building an Interoperable Instant Payment infrastructure designed to connect mobile money providers, microfinance institutions, banks, and payment platforms into a unified ecosystem accessible to all citizens.
The vision is sound. Financial inclusion would accelerate. Transaction costs would fall. The informal economy would integrate into the formal financial system, unlocking not only new government revenue but also economic opportunity.
Yet during implementation, a fundamental gap between technical capability and human reality emerged. Users needed to use one MSISDN to transact across providers by registering unto the switch.
This is where transformation began.
The Institute for Inclusive Digital Africa (IIDiA) recognised that the challenge wasn’t technological failure, but architectural misalignment. IIDiA along with INFITX, its technical partner, agreed to enhance The Gambia’s Mojaloop-based platform with Sub-ID routing. This configuration-driven approach interprets payment identifiers intelligently using embedded information.
The collaboration delivered more than a national solution. INFITX contributed the Account Lookup Service (ALS) Static Oracle enhancements directly back to the Mojaloop Foundation, ensuring the innovation remains open-source, reusable, and available to digital payment systems worldwide.
The shift was profound. Instead of forcing Gambians to adapt their behaviour to fit the system, the system learned to understand how Gambians actually transact.
The results speak directly to policymakers: no cumbersome opt-in and opt-out process to block adoption; no costly re-registration campaigns; zero new regulatory requirements.
IIDiA’s role illustrates a unique approach to digital public infrastructure: bring the right technical partners to the table, identify what’s actually blocking people from using systems built for them, then ensure the solutions don’t just fix one country’s problem, they strengthen the shared infrastructure everyone can build on.
For central banks and finance ministries across Africa, The Gambia offers a proven blueprint: interoperability is not achieved solely through connectivity between institutions. It depends on architectural choices that reduce friction at the user level. Open, configuration-based infrastructure can accelerate adoption, contain costs, and improve resilience by fitting better.
