Open finance could ease Africa’s credit access

A Nairobi vegetable-stall owner with 11 years of trading and phone-based payments remains difficult for lenders to assess because her financial activity is unrecorded or scattered across systems. The UN says 89.6% of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa was informal in 2024, while 40% of adults in the region had a mobile money account, up from 27% in 2021. At the third Africa Credit & Risk Reporting Conference in Windhoek, delegates from 13 countries emphasized that the challenge is making financial data trustworthy, connected and useful for credit decisions—not merely increasing its volume.