Midweek Check-In: The New Africa 🌍 Is Agent Driven

…how are you leveraging it??? 🤔🧐

Oct 15, 2025

Barev, Dear Innovator 💫

Quick reality check…

While you’re doing your self-assessment, true story here…

When I was a student, I’d always queue up at one of the many ATM stands scattered across campus to withdraw the allowance my parents sent every week (I knowww, parents and too much wisdom. Is it their self-control??? 🙄)

One particular day, as soon as my sponsors credited me, I joined the queue to make a withdrawal and stood in line for almost an hour. I needed the money to get dinner, but just when it was about to get to my turn, the line started to scatter.

“E don finish,” they said, and I couldn’t even be angry. It had become a regular thing. I ended up borrowing from my roommate to pay for dinner, but that one hour of my life, who’s giving it back? 😒

That was centuries ago (or at least it feels like it 👀), and back then, it was unheard of to pay for food online or transfer money to food vendors. Fast forward to 2025, the African story is a lot different. It’s not entirely cashless like our ‘oyibo’ counterparts, but it’s definitely agent-driven.

Here’s what the numbers say (as adopted from TechPoint Africa):

In South Africa, Standard Bank has shut down 1,942 ATMs since 2019, with 84% of South Africans now preferring digital payments 💰for transactions above R100 ($5).
In Kenya, ATMs have dropped to 2,282 (the lowest in five years) while mobile money platforms processed KES 6.5 trillion ($43 billion) in just nine months, with 79 million active wallets.
In Nigeria, POS 💳 transactions jumped 209% to ₦10.45 trillion in Q1 2025, and electronic payments overall hit ₦284.99 trillion. There are now over 8.3 million registered POS terminals, nearly six million active.
In Ghana, mobile money transactions reached GHS 365 billion in April 2025 📈 (whoooshhh!)
In Egypt, mobile wallet transactions hit EGP 943.4 billion in Q2 2025, up 72% from last year.

Across these economies, the pattern is clear. People, not machines, are now the frontlines of financial access. But you know what’s more interesting? 🤔 This shift isn’t just happening in fintech. It’s reshaping how we build and distribute everything!

See nah 👇

In Agrictech 🌱 Extension Africa (Nigeria) has been doing something amazing and unique. They train extension agents drawn from different farming communities. These agents deliver advisory services, aggregate farmer demand for inputs, link farmers to markets, help with quality/data collection.
Fez Delivery (Nigeria) is also a prime example in the logistics game. They use a network of third-party dispatch riders to fulfill deliveries across Nigeria.
Living Goods (Kenya) also trains, equips and pays community health workers (CHWs) who go door-to-door delivering health care, selling essential medicines, doing diagnostics, making referrals and keeping digital health records. The CHWs use the Smart Health app to keep track of inventory, for reporting and supervisors monitor performance in near-real time

From edtech to healthcare to logistics and AI solutions, the REAL questions to ask are:

Who are our “agents”?
How distributed are we?
Who carries our solution into the places where our tech can’t fully reach yet?

This, Dear Innovator, is a design question, not just a financial one.

Because if access is still largely human, then scaling impact will depend less on pure tech and more on how well your ecosystem of agents, partners, or distributors can represent your product on the ground.

Africa’s transformation isn’t happening on screens alone. It’s happening through people who bridge the gap between the online and the offline; those who make digital adoption feel familiar, even to those who’ve never been online.

And if the end goal is to operate in an agent-driven Africa, then the real play is to design your business, your culture, and your data flows around those people who actually make the system run.

How will you be leveraging this human infrastructure today? 🤔

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