About page

About hero title
About Africa Digital Financial Inclusion
About hero body
Welcome to the DFI Database produced by ADFI. Learn more about the purpose and structure of the Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Database and the portal's owner - The African Digital Financial Inclusion Facility. This is your starting point for understanding the status quo of Digital Financial Inclusion (DFI) across the African continent.
About item title
Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI)
About text first content

This portal has been developed by the Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI).

As a leading pan-African multi-donor fund, ADFI seeks to break down barriers to the growth, uptake and use of digital financial solutions to accelerate financial inclusion in general and reduce the gender gap in financial inclusion in particular.

ADFI works to make digital financial solutions in Africa valuable, affordable, safe and accessible by making strategic and catalytic investments across three main pillars: (i) digital infrastructure (ii) policy and regulation and (iii) products and innovation with gender inclusion and capacity building as cross-cutting themes. 

For more information: www.adfi.org

About item images
About text second content
  • Digital Infrastructure: Providing the foundations to reach the largest share of Africans
    A critical barrier to financial inclusion is the lack of inclusive digital infrastructure across Africa. The infrastructure required for widespread mobile connectivity and usage is integral to the uptake and use of digital financial services, especially in rural and remote areas of Africa. Equally critical for the expansion of digital financial services is financial infrastructure, like interoperable digital payment systems and distribution networks, as well as digital identification, e-commerce, Artificial-Intelligence and robust security platforms, which facilitate efficient, affordable and secure transactions, and allow for scale.
  • Policy and Regulation: Supporting African regulators to create an enabling environment for financial inclusion.
    Recognising that policy and regulation are critical tools for protecting citizens and ensuring market competitiveness, ADFI is committed to invest in financial regulation and policies that keep pace with digital infrastructure improvements and technology innovations across Africa. Working with key regulatory bodies, such as central banks, competition authorities, regional economic integration bodies, and government ministries, ADFI seeks to support enabling environments for financial inclusion. Such partnerships aim to advocate for changes in policies and regulations that build capacity across the digital financial services ecosystem and address policy barriers that hinder access for women and other opportunities such as agency banking, micro loans, savings and insurance through investments. 
  • Digital Products and Innovation: Leveraging technology for a more financially-inclusive Africa.
    Scaling up digital financial services innovations can help boost shared prosperity, resilience and livelihoods, unlocking multiple income and revenue opportunities and enabling financial inclusion for the underserved and excluded populations – MSMEs, youth, women, rural populations, among others. Beyond basic banking and payment solutions, digital financial solutions can provide essential tools across both financial and real sectors, facilitating the realisation of innovative use cases in the financial services, small business, agricultural, green finance, education, health, transport and energy sectors.

ADFI mainstreams capacity building and gender inclusion as cross-cutting themes across all our work:

  • Capacity building: Elevating DFS stakeholder capacity to advance inclusive growth across the continent.
    A cross-cutting workstream to reinforce partners' capacities across ADFI projects, supporting awareness-raising and skill development across the digital financial ecosystem in order to stimulate innovation and digital adoption.
  • Gender inclusion: Investing in inclusive DFS that will make a lasting impact on the lives of women across the continent.
    When women access digital financial services, they are able to access some of the basic tools needed to thrive in the formal economy and are better positioned to start businesses, invest in their future and provide for their families. ADFI supports initiatives that are gender-intentional or gender-transformative, that is to either to be designed to transform gender power relations and actively seek to change gender norms or to reduce the gender gap in access to digital financial solutions and resources.
About page button text
Read more on our Funding Partners
About hero button text
Explore more on ADFI
About second item title
Funding Partners
About second item text content

The Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI) was launched in 2019 by the African Development Bank in partnership with the Gates Foundation, the French Development Agency (AFD), the Ministry of Finance, Government of Luxembourg, joined by the Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, France, the Women's Enterprise Finance Initiative (We-Fi) and the Ministry of Finance, India in 2020, 2022 and 2023 respectively.