UDPN, Forus Digital working to facilitate adoption of central bank digital currencies in Africa

By Andrei Skvarsky.

Online payment service providers UDPN and Forus Digital have agreed a project to promote the digitalisation of financial services across Africa and lay the basis for the adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in the continent, where hundreds of millions of people are unbanked.

Seeking more extensive use of blockchain is a key task of the project, Forus said in a statement. It said the scheme would take off in South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia before being extended to the rest of Africa.

Lowering the costs of payments and foreign exchange is one of the aims of the planned measures, according to Forus, which is a pan-African company headquartered in Cape Town.

Logistically, the project will be based on the resources of UDPN (Universal Digital Payments Network), a company based in Singapore. Forus said that in Sub-Saharan Africa about 105m adults are unbanked and lack proper identification documents. Throughout Africa, it said, more than 350m adults live on a cash-only basis without access to bank accounts, credit cards or lending facilities.

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