Hey, Sheriff here 👋

So this week, I found out that Africa pays about $5 billion a year to move money between its own countries.

Today we look at where all that money actually goes, and at the company trying to simplify the process.

Let’s get into it.

That line opened a cross-border payments forum in Nairobi in May. 

Kenya and Tanzania share a border, a trading bloc and, in most transactions, a language. What they do not share is a way to move money directly between them. 

Say you’re a coffee trader in Kenya who needs to pay his supplier in Tanzania, here’s the journey your money typically has to take:

These are two currencies from countries next to each other, but they need several intermediaries, and the payment arrives days later.

Sometimes, it might be easier to drive the money across the border.

We wrote about this problem in 2024, and Kora was the company we used to explain it. 

Kora had built an API that allowed businesses across Africa to receive money from any country in one place.

Two years on, more providers have launched, more APIs have shipped, and PAPSS (an intra-African payment rail) has expanded to 19 countries. 

The structural cost, however, has barely moved. 

Routing intra-African payments through banks in Europe and the US still drains an estimated $5 billion from the continent every year. 

Sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa costs close to 8.8% of the value in fees on average, the highest rate of any region in the world. Settlement on regional trade still runs three to five days.

The issue isn’t that no one is working on fixing this problem. It simply runs too deep and is structural.

Africa has 54 countries and about 42 currencies. 

Each currency sits under its own central bank, its own settlement system, and its own licensing regime. No two markets share a standard, so every new corridor is a separate build rather than a configuration change. 

For instance, eight of the ten countries in West Africa speak French. They all spend a currency called CFA Franc.

In Central Africa, there are six French-speaking countries, and they all use the same currency, the CFA Franc. 

But these two CFAs aren’t the same, and they can’t be directly swapped for each other. To change one for the other, you need an intermediary currency like the dollar or the Euro.

The West African CFA Franc (XOF) has its own Central Bank in Dakar, and the Central African one (XAF) has its own in Yaounde, Cameroon; just six hours apart by air. But they don’t talk to each other.

This fragmentation problem is all too common across Africa. Underneath the fragmentation is a deeper issue: liquidity.

Very few African currency pairs trade against each other with any depth. There is no real naira-to-shilling market with active traders providing the supply of currency on both sides. 

There is no deep cedi-to-rand market. Banks buy and price what they can hedge, and what they can hedge is dollars.

That is how the dollar ended up in the middle of almost every African payment; not because anyone chose it, but because it is the only currency every market has a price for.

A lot has been said about how the dollar became the currency the world trades in. But in Africa, it’s also the middleman currency for cross-border transactions, and this comes at a cost.

Once the dollar sits in the middle, a payment converts twice instead of once. The first leg is from the base currency to the dollar, and the second is from the dollar to the destination currency.

Each conversion carries a spread; a small fee paid for the conversion. Each institution in the value chain charges a fee. Each one also has its own cut-off times, business hours, and downtimes.

These all add up to two things: high fees and long settlement times.

For companies running on thin margins while doing business across borders in Africa, this gap could be suffocating. It could also decide whether a neighbouring market is worth entering at all.

It’s why most of Africa’s regional trade is still settled informally, because swapping currencies in person is cheaper than having the same funds do a round trip around the world.

It’s a tedious workaround, but when the workaround is cheaper and faster than the formal channel, businesses use the workaround.

Until a better option comes along.

In 2018, Dickson Nsofor, a Nigerian entrepreneur, launched Kora to solve a problem he’d experienced firsthand: sending money home from abroad.

It took off, but after running the company for a while, he realized that businesses across Africa had a bigger version of this problem: they couldn’t pay each other. 

So Kora pivoted.

It built a tool that allowed businesses in Nigeria to collect payments through the main channels: banks, cards, or USSD.

It also allowed them to issue, share, and track invoices to keep a keen eye on their payments.

After gaining ground in Nigeria where it launched, it built an API that allowed businesses to collect payments across multiple African markets. 

This API condensed the fragmented payment systems in different markets into one API.

This meant that a Nigerian business could collect Kenyan Shillings, pay a Ghanaian supplier in Cedis, and track all its invoices and payments in one place.

It dropped the settlement times from 3 - 5 days to 24 hours. 

It helped businesses cut the need for a different settlement provider in every market, a different integration for every currency, and a different way to track inflow from each one.

This cut costs, reconciliation time, and the likelihood of things going wrong.

But beneath it all, the fundamental two-step journey from base currency to dollar and back to the destination currency persisted.

Last year, Kora noticed another rail popping up on the playing field.

There’s a new-ish way to send money anywhere in the world that doesn’t need banks, cash, or intermediaries; only code. It’s called Stablecoins.

These are digital versions of real currencies like the dollar, euro, or shilling, which are created and owned by people on a digital network.

One unit of these “stablecoins” equals one unit of the analogous currency in the real world. So, 1 USDT = $1.

Stablecoins have been around since 2014, but people didn't start to notice until 2020.

With it, money can be sent, received, and used online without ever needing an intermediary. And nowhere was this a better solution than in Africa.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value, a 52% increase on the year before. 

Stablecoins now account for roughly 43% of the region’s crypto transaction volume. 

In 2025, Nigeria received $92.1 billion in stablecoins. A disproportionate share moves in transactions under $10,000; a sign that people are using them to pay for things.

It’s also becoming a payment method of choice. A YouGov survey in February found that 95% of Nigerian respondents would rather be paid in stablecoins than in local currency.

Kora saw the emergence of stablecoins as a genuine solution to the cross-border payment problem.

But it also knew a familiar truth. Building on a new rail altogether simply encourages the fragmentation it set out to fix.

The emergence of stablecoins didn’t mean that fiat was going away. 

Kora’s answer to this is its new product: One Rail.

One Rail adds stablecoin settlement to the platform Kora already runs and allows businesses get paid in any form they want.

A business can collect in fiat or in stablecoins, hold value in either, and pay out in either.

In practice, that looks like this. 

Making the choice of rail optional makes one truth clear: users don’t think about the rail at all. 

They just want to get paid, and they care about how much that costs and how fast it gets cleared.

Putting both rails in one place and letting users choose gives them the best of both worlds, the trust that comes with fiat rails, and the speed that comes with stablecoins.

Most attempts to fix African cross-border payments have worked on making the dollar leg faster. 

Kora’s answer is to make it optional, while keeping the fiat rails businesses still need on the same platform and the same integration. 

One fintech company is already onboarding on One Rail, using it to open its savings and payments corridors beyond Nigeria and let customers hold more than one asset.

If you want your business on it early, you can join the waitlist here.

And if you would rather hear it from the people building it, Kora's CEO Dickson Nsofor is joining us live tomorrow. He is sitting down with Yvonne Kagondu of Blockwisely and Tomi Ayorinde of Timon to talk about what stablecoins actually unlock for African trade.

Cheers,

Sheriff.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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