Manufacturers and small businesses are set to benefit from a new era of seamless cross-border payments, thanks to the launch of the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System- PAPSS Cowry, a game-changing payment platform.

This cutting-edge platform, backed by Afreximbank, the AU and AfCFTA, and recently launched in Lagos, promises to increase efficiency, reduce costs and boost trade across the continent as it connects 160 banks across 19 countries and positions Africa for a bigger share of its $329 cross-border market.

The platform delivers 120-second local currency settlement, removing USD bottlenecks, cutting FX friction and strengthening the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) driven trade flows.

Mike Ogbalu, CEO of PAPSS, in his keynote address at the platform launch themed ‘Building an Interoperable and Sovereign Africa Payment Ecosystem for Trade and Economic Growth,’ explained that AfCFTA has provided a single market for the continent’s 1.9 billion people that needs a seamless cross-border payment platform to trade.

“We have created it as an ecosystem that will pack all of us together in a way that we are able to empower each other rather than compete,” he said.

“Create a centralised value that everybody can leverage without affecting the individual value proposition of all the entities that leverage this way,” he added.

He stated that the Pan-Africa payment rail has connected 19 countries and plans to expand to 40, adding that 160 leading commercial banks across the continent are connected to the platform.

“We are also now enabling fintech companies across the continent to be able to originate payments in one market and terminate them in another market,” he explained.

“PAPSS is that financial market infrastructure that allows for the processing of cross-border payments in local currencies and is able to do that in no more than 120 seconds,” he added.

He appreciated central banks across the continent for their support, saying that a governance infrastructure has been created to make sure the payment system continues to operate in the right way. He stressed that sovereign payments are critical for the continent’s survival.

Haytham EI Maayerigi, executive vice president – global trade bank, Afreximbank, stressed that African businesses still face real barriers, whose border payments remain slow, expensive, and impossible sometimes, with $5 billion lost yearly to third-currency routing.

He explained that the situation has made it difficult for small businesses to find trusted partners, affordable finance and adequate market information, noting that with AfCFTA advancing, it must be easy for firms to trade with each other.

He said Afrexim, which is a promoter of PAPSS, works daily to remove these obstacles. “Together with AfCTA and the African Union, we are building the institutional foundation of a truly integrated market, supporting a lot of the initiatives.”

“Through advisory, guarantees, certification and project preparation, we mobilise the capital that builds factories, logistic hubs, processing plants, energy systems, the backbone of African industrialisation.”

He stressed that capital alone will not deliver integration and that the African continental trade also needs a digital spine, a system that connects markets, trust, information, logistics, finance and payments.

Experts say Africa requires a better business environment to unleash its potential and drive intra-African trade. The experts noted that the PAPSS Cowry platform will help improve the ease of doing business across the continent.

Wamkele Mene, secretary general, AfCFTA Secretariat, described the platform as a key enabler of AfCFTA, giving its practical effect on the continent’s vision of a fully integrated African market.

“It operationalises financial sovereignty by enabling the seamless flow of funds needed to sustain the world’s largest free trade area, and by reducing the friction that has historically held back intra-Africa trade,” Mene said.

He noted that the continent has 42 currencies, which alone creates structural barriers, saying that when two African traders rely on a third-country currency to trade, the cost of doing business rises sharply.

“Our continent loses an estimated $5billion annually in currency conversion.” PAPSS addresses this bottleneck directly by enabling instant settlement in local currencies and reducing reliance on expensive corresponding banking corridors.”

Africans are better educated today than they have been at any other time, with many African nations making strides towards ensuring access to quality education and lifelong learning for their citizens.

Afrilearn

UNESCO’s report on Transforming Learning and Skills Development notes that delivering education well is not only a fundamental human right, it is also a critical ingredient of building solid foundations for the future, empowering people not just to develop the skills they will need for the workplace, but also ensuring that they can unlock their potential as members of society.

UNICEF estimates that there are 450 million school-age children in Africa in 2025, and this population is predicted to swell to over 600 million by 2050. However, although 75 million more African children are enrolled in school today compared to 2015, the number of out-of-school children has increased by 13.2 million to over 100 million during the same period. For Africa to actively participate in the global digital economy, it’s a continent-wide imperative to unlock not just access to education, but access to the resources that will help children thrive in education.

Harnessing technology to provide educational resources

Millions of children across the continent are eager but struggling to learn or are dropping out due to the high cost of quality education, outdated materials, and overburdened teachers. Schools also struggle with reliable web access – the Global Education Monitoring Report found that Africa has the lowest school connectivity globally, with most schools lacking even basic electricity, making reliable internet rare. Mobile penetration in Africa is far higher, yet many learning platforms are built for the web.

In 2020, frustrated by their own experiences, and tired of witnessing how young Africans were held back by a lack of access to quality education, a group of entrepreneurs started Afrilearn International Limited. Their goal was simple, but ambitious: to democratise access to quality education across Africa using a mobile-first solution.

The company started with ClassNotes.ng, which quickly became the #1 education platform in Nigeria, empowering students with curriculum-based class notes. By July 2022, Afrilearn had reached 1 million learners across Nigeria and Africa, a major step in delivering quality education to undeserved communities.

Now, this AI-powered K-12 learning platform is on a mission to make world-class education freely available to all African children by making learning fun, using gamified experiences to engage school learners with their studies.

The Afrilearn App for Students provides a comprehensive library of study materials and homework help. Learners can master a subject using the class notes, video lessons, quiz materials and games on the app, earning coins, and winning rewards along the way, while parents can track their children’s progress through learning reports. Afrilearn also provides adaptive practice for local and international exams through Exambly.com, which provides free exam practice for entrance, admission and matriculation exams across Africa.

Supporting educators is part of the process

To support educators, Afrilearn has built and refined its new AI-powered School Management Software, which is a smart platform for learning, administration, and managing school fees, reports and results.

The company collaborates with Schoolinka, a leading African teacher-training organisation, to co-create and distribute professional development resources, onboard teachers onto Afrilearn, and support schools with continuous training. This has significantly improved teacher adoption and classroom impact across the schools Afrilearn serves.

A constant evolution

The School Management Software offering was developed as part of the first cohort of the Microsoft and NVIDIA African GenAI Accelerator Programme. The collaboration allowed Afrilearn to leverage Azure AI and cloud infrastructure to enhance automation, learning personalisation and school analytics on the platform.

The company created a rebuilt, AI-powered SMS programme during the Accelerator Programme, and plans to introduce upgrades including adaptive learning profiles, predictive analytics and automated fee management for schools, and offline-first learning flows. Teachers will soon benefit from enhanced AI tools for lesson preparation and assessments.

With Microsoft’s support, Afrilearn uses GitHub for its engineering workflow, enabling the company to release updates faster and with fewer errors. Visual Studio Code is the team’s preferred integrated development environment, as its integration with Axure extensions, debugging tools and GitHub repository reduce friction across engineering tasks. Collectively, these tools, alongside Azure, have improved delivery speed, strengthened reliability and enabled the team to build a more stable, scalable AI education platform. And for a distributed team working in multiple countries, Microsoft’s collaboration tools, Teams and Sharepoint, have proven invaluable for daily contact and communication.

Broadening access to education across Africa

To date, Afrilearn has reached more than 4 million learners and more than 800 schools across more than 10 countries. More than 80% of users report achieving improved learning outcomes within a week of consistent usage, while the AI-powered personalisation improves learners’ grades by up to 52 percent within eight weeks of consistent study. Schools implementing the Afrilearn management software have saved more than 10 administrative hours per week and have boosted their fee collection by 35 to 40 percent.

The Afrilearn team has big ambitions to scale into additional countries across Africa, deepening partnerships with UNICEF and the African Union to scale their impact. In addition to Nigeria, Afrilearn serves learners in Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gambia and the wider diaspora.

“At Afrilearn, we’re the ecosystem closing the gap between Africa’s potential and its future, where no child is left behind because of where they live or how much their parents earn. We’re especially excited about our upcoming product upgrades that make personalised learning even more accessible to children at home and in school,” says Isaac Oladipupo, CEO at Afrilearn. “Our goal is to reach 10 million learners across 12 African countries in the next 36 months. We believe that every child deserves a quality education that positions them for future success.”

Yemi Kale, Afreximbank’s Group Chief Economist, yesterday said that Nigeria is positioned to drive Africa’s transition into a digitally enabled trade ecosystem, arguing that the country’s demographic strength and emerging innovation hubs give it a competitive edge as the continent reshapes its economic future under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Speaking in Abuja on Thursday at Afreximbank’s high-level forum on trade intelligence and digital innovation, themed “Unlocking Nigeria’s Trade and Investment Potential Through Digital Innovation and the Abuja AATC”, Kale said Africa is “at a defining inflection point” that will determine whether it reacts to global economic shifts or helps shape them.

He noted that the AfCFTA’s unified market—covering more than 1.3 billion people and a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion—offers countries like Nigeria a historic opening to boost industrialisation and deepen regional value chains. “The AfCFTA presents a unique once-in-a-generation opportunity to expand and strengthen regional value chains,” Kale said.

He added that deeper integration will help African economies diversify away from primary commodities and build resilience against external shocks, long-standing vulnerabilities that have limited growth across the continent.

Kale said digital transformation is now the most powerful lever to unlock the AfCFTA’s potential, as African economies still face fragmented markets, high logistics costs, weak trade data systems and cross-border payment frictions.

He argued that digital tools—from automated customs processing to e-commerce platforms and blockchain-enabled documentation—could sharply cut transaction costs and improve market access for Nigerian firms.

“Digital innovation is therefore not just the engine of trade—it is the new highway on which African commerce will travel,” he said. “Those who build and use this highway early will lead tomorrow’s markets.”

He cited Rwanda’s digital single-window system, which cut export processing times by more than 90%, and Africa’s mobile-money infrastructure, which handles more than $800 billion annually, as examples of what digital trade systems can deliver at scale.

Kale also highlighted the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which enables cross-border payments in local currencies and is expected to save African businesses billions in conversion costs.

He illustrated the transformative impact of digital tools with the story of a young leather-goods exporter from Kano who turned a small operation into a cross-continental business after adopting digital trade platforms and digital payments. “Her success is a clear example of how digital innovation can turn local ambition into continental and global opportunity,” he said.

Nigeria, he added, has the natural ingredients to lead Africa’s digital trade surge, including a young population, a fast-growing technology sector, and entrepreneurs who are already building products for global markets.

“We are a nation of entrepreneurs, creators and problem-solvers, and our demographic advantage is unmatched,” Kale said.

With 65% of Nigerians under age 25, he said the country’s youth “are founding technology start-ups, writing software code, designing digital solutions, and shaping entirely new industries.”

Afreximbank, he disclosed, intends to play a catalytic role by financing trade and investment, strengthening regional value chains and rolling out digital infrastructure through the Africa Trade Gateway (ATG).

The Gateway integrates trade information, due-diligence tools, market insights and secure payment systems—capabilities he described as essential for businesses aiming to scale across Africa.

Kale said Nigeria’s leadership is already evident with the launch of the Abuja Afreximbank African Trade Centre (AATC), which he described as both a strategic asset and symbolic commitment to modernising Africa’s trade architecture.

The centre combines conference facilities, SME incubation hubs, trade-information services and access to the ATG under one roof, and is the first in a planned network of one-stop trade centres across Africa and the diaspora.

Urging policymakers and private-sector leaders to seize the moment, Kale stressed, “If we commit to digital transformation, to collaboration, and to bold, forward-looking action, then Africa will not only participate in the global economy—we will shape it.”

He further argued that a digitally integrated continent would unlock new opportunities for farmers, creatives, SMEs and young innovators. “This is not a distant dream,” he said. “It is a future within our reach.”